Is This on the Exam?

From: http://www.newsweek.com/

By David Ansen
Nov 9, 2007 Updated: 11:07 a.m. ET Nov 9, 2007

Related:
Robert Redford
Tom Cruise
Matthew Michael Carnahan

There's a scene in "Lions for Lambs," shown in some of the trailers, in which Robert Redford, playing a concerned college professor, tries to shake a cynical student out of his apathy. "Rome is burning!" he declares. The words may have been written by screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, but there's no doubt it's director Redford's heartfelt belief that's being expressed, and we know he's not talking about ancient history.
It's hard to think of a precedent for "Lions for Lambs." When was the last time three stars of the magnitude of Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise teamed up to make … a Socratic debate on the perilous state of our nation? Never, as far as I know. Intelligent, deadly serious, made in a spirit of patriotism and protest, Redford's movie is more civics lesson than drama and doesn't pretend otherwise. It is what it is: a call to action. Nothing if not topical, "Lions for Lambs" addresses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, questions the idea that it is America's duty to spread democracy around the world, criticizes journalism's capitulation to political manipulation, debates the proper response to terrorism, asks the audience to ponder its own responsibility to speak truth to power, and reprimands us for allowing Bad Things to happen to a Good Country.
Three threads are intertwined in Carnahan's unashamedly didactic script. In the most compelling third, Cruise and Streep face off in a tense debate. He's a gung-ho, saber-rattling, pro-war Republican senator, and she's a skeptical TV journalist he's handpicked to reveal a bold new offensive in the Afghanistan battle against the Taliban. A second debate, all of which transpires in a college office, pits Redford's professor against that bright but disaffected student (Andrew Garfield), whose conscience he's trying to prick: if Rome's burning, we all have to get off our duffs and quench the fire. The third part (the only one that isn't all talk—but the dullest and most perfunctory) shows us two of the professor's former students (Derek Luke and Michael Peña), who, to their teacher's horror, have taken up his call to activism by enlisting. They are, in fact, carrying out the bold and dangerous mission that Cruise is simultaneously selling to Streep—flying by chopper into the mountains of Afghanistan, where they are shot down and surrounded by enemy guerilla fighters.

A movie designed to raise questions rather than provide answers, it tries to give Cruise's hawkish senator his due, but it's doubtful many will find him the hero of the piece—how many neocons are going to fork over eight bucks for what is clearly a prosecutorial position paper from one of Hollywood's leading liberal voices? It remains to be seen as well how many critics of Bush's regime want to see a movie that just as easily could have been a play—or even a radio drama. Carnahan's script is thoughtful, but its ideal venue may be a college debate class, not your local multiplex. While it's fun watching Streep and Cruise go at each other—he a portrait of slick, cocky aggression, she parrying his assertions with irony and disbelief—they are not playing characters so much as positions. My hat is off to the passion that propels this movie, but I wish more of that urgency were reflected in the filmmaking; Redford's movie, in its attempt to be judicious, gives off the scent of the classroom. Perhaps the most eloquent and telling thing about "Lions for Lambs" is that it exists at all. A movie like this would never have been made unless a whole lot of people—not just a trio of movie stars—felt they were living in a burning Rome.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

Blogger Comment:

1- To watch the three great stars Redford, Streep and Cruise together is a given.

2- The movie is about reality and to understand it best is by watching the last scene when after Streep crossed the white house riding the car she saw graves of American soldiers from wars.

3- It is not about enjoying our intellectuality and winning dialogue but about real people dying in wars or going to wars with no hope for an end.

4- It is about our futures as Americans are we going to fight elusive wars or will come with big plans?.

5- The tutoring relation between Redford and his student is the relation between Redford and all of us. Are we going to rise up and come up with solutions. Do we have the potential to stand up and change our destiny. We have our chances are we going to use it or we are going to leave our future on the hands of few politicians to gamble with our future, what ever good intentions they have. It is not about Redford the movie star and director it is about all of us all Americans.

6- I remember when I came up with the Taman Health Plan and was going to bargain by it to free my people I was blocked by the American government from getting it to the public. They wanted to protect the Arab tyrants since I have the potential to attract a lot of Arab audience through my writings. For honesty they wanted to spread freedom but in a slow process or through elections that the extremists are waiting to win it without getting major restructuring.

7- It is not about someone come out to take his role in our lives or in history. It is about all of us are we going to watch Rome burning or we are going to change our world. Americans' Muslims are Americans and when Rome will burn down it will be over their heads as well. The question is to all of us are we going as Americans including me green-carded American to have the dialogue and change the world. Redford believes we have the potential and it was his last word to the student to think and through his free will to make his decision. Redford did what he can do best to call us and put the question. We are as Americans all to decide. It will never be one person like me to stand alone to change the world. I do not have the power to stand against the governments, religious beneficiaries, their media and corporations. It is about all of us do we have the will to unite and have the right dialogue?.