Syriana

C+

Directed by Stephen Gaghan

"Syriana," or as I like to call it, "Traffic: The Middle Eastern Adventures" is writer/director Stephen Gaghan's attempt at high brow political commentary and, although he isn't entirely unsuccesful at producing a sleek, entertaining film, the politics that buttress the film are as ridiculous and simplistic as Gaghan likely believed them to be timely and deep.

"Syriana" follows an elliptical, multi-character storyline in which a number of different subplots are interwoven until, as we might expect, they call come together at the end in a mostly unbelievable climax. I must say that this narrative device, which seems to be de rigeur in Hollywood these days as evidenced by such films as "21 Grams," "Babel," or the aforementioned "Traffic" has likely worn out its welcome. When a film needs to build most of its intrique around the question of how a number of disparate, seemingly unrelated storylines will meet, there usually isn't any real meat to the underlying story. "Syriana" is at least mildly succesful in stringing together a series of stories that don't seem that wildly unrelated even though, as mentioned before, the ultimate congress of these storylines likely caused more than a few raised eyebrows.

The biggest problem with Syriana is that its preachy policial message, namely that American multinational business interests are holding underdeveloped nations hostage to greed, is treated in the most hamfisted, semi-three dimensional way possible. In Gaghan's world political issues are black or white and the possibility that some type of nuance may exist in the relationship between business and domestic and foreign politics is given no more than a passing thought, leading to a film that comes to ridiculous conclusions about the nature of U.S. foreign policy and its relationship to business. According to Gaghan, profit for American big business is where the buck stops in terms of U.S foreign policy and what is good for Big Oil is seen as good for the Red White and Blue. Although this type of thinking will resonate profoundly with the young and impressionable youths of America's colleges, anyone with even a basic knowledge of American foreign policy will likely respond to "Syriana's" loaded poltical message with a certain amount of skepticism.