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 This Lamb Won't RoarI left the cinema that day with a big grin on my face. I nailed it. Every year at least one decent motion picture slips under Like most observers I was surprised Crash won the 2006 Oscar for Best Picture. It knocked over Fast forward: 2007. Lions for Lambs, a film arriving with some herald, one I chose to see simply for that fact that Robert Redford and Meryl Streep were in it (and despite the fact that Tom Cruise was in it). The screenplay is one of the two that Matthew Carnahan has written, the other was the recently released The Kingdom. I’m not sure how to characterize The Kingdom, but I can confidently say it was the best screenplay produced by Carnahan in 2007. Usually it’s the job of the director to take a slightly weak screenplay and make it worse. I am reticent to say this is what happened with Lions for Lambs because Now Tom Cruise and Robert Redford have something that inextricably binds them: they’ve both starred in the same bad film. The error of judgment, everybody on this motion picture made, was thinking that big name cast members could take a pay cut and that writer, producer and director could take the fractured narrative approach of Crash and make another hit. They were wrong. Robert you’re 71 years old and you still look great, you belong in front of a camera not behind it. Lions for Lambs is a protest film, it is against war, it is against Bush and, if it had any chance of working, it should have been against Scientology as well. I will concede that I didn’t take notes but as I recall, Streep plays Janine Roth, a liberal journalist working for a fictitious television news channel, The key here is that they are all made up characters in made up scenarios, attached to made up organizations. Except Cruise, who plays a made up Senator; but, as his character is that of an unsympathetic G.O.P. hawk, he’s a member of the very real Republican Party… and who is the President of the If Michael Moore was ever going to make the leap from the fiction he calls documentary to fiction which is otherwise called fiction, this is the screenplay he would have wanted. Let’s face it, it’s a protest film. And I adhere very steadfastly to my belief that protestors should protest and actors should act, they should not protest (or direct for that matter). If you really must use motion picture as your medium of war protest think M*A*S*H or Catch 22 or for anti-government films it’s hard to go past Bulworth or Wag The Dog. Sorry Bob, as protest film, Lions for Lambs fails; but that’s okay because it also fails as a fractured narrative, it fails as a vehicle for the combined talents of an esteemed cast and, most importantly to the bean counters, it failed at the box office. Next time just give the money straight to the people who need it, promise to keep Tom Cruise at home and then go on Oprah and tell the world it was money well spent.
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