Lions for Lambs (2007)
DVD (region 4)
d. Robert Redford; pr. Tracy Falco, Andrew Hauptman, Robert Redford, Matthew Michael Carnahan; scr. Matthew Michael Carnahan; ph. Philippe Rousselot; m . Mark Isham; ed. Joe Hutshing; cast. Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield, Peter Berg (92 mins)
As America finds itself immersed in the Iraq war, an ambitious Republican senator (Tom Cruise) reacts to his President facing low approval ratings on the ability to win the war on terror. A reporter (Meryl Streep) is doing a post 9-11 terrorist timeline and interviews Cruise, who wants her to head up a story about a new initiative he has set up which could win the war on terror and the hearts and, he believes, the minds of the people involved. Two idealistic former students of a college professor (Robert Redford) are involved in this initiative – radical military excursions in Afghanistan.
Although Cruise is here playing a Senator, certain script references to Bush-isms like “mission accomplished” ally him to a Presidential figure and as he puts the events of the film in motion, initially has such status. Thus, his concerns for a nuclearized Iraq and increased military mobilization mark him as a classically Republican figure. Cruise plays him as such, bringing memories of his role as the salesman in Magnolia in the process. When Cruise demands an unequivocal response to the question “do you want to win the war on terror – yes or no?” which he considers an epochal issue, the characterization stops just short of knowing caricature. Cruise refuses to examine prior US foreign policy as responsible in any way for the current war on terror, an attitude director Redford holds representative of the Republican mentality, which claimed that to cast aspersions on US foreign policy was unpatriotic in a mentality which divided the world into those either with the USA or against the USA. He sees 9-11 and the US unprepared-ness for terror on home soil as the justification for military intervention in the affairs of foreign nations so as to ensure US political hegemony.
Scenes of fighting men on a mission are interspersed with political intrigue, nicely suggesting the ease with which hawkish Republicans can place lives in jeopardy. Likewise, the gung-ho militarism that qualifies the military ethic rapidly disappears in the intense stress of actual combat. Combat here is far from the vainglorious thrill it was in, for instance, Black Hawk Down: it is unheroic and costly in light of intelligence inadequacies such as depicted here. The juxtaposition of the political showmanship and the military blunder expose and dramatize the gulf between intention and execution that director Redford feels characterizes the Republican-led War on Terror as exemplified by the mishandling of the Iraq War. And: in Redford’s character as a professor recruiting the best and brightest out of a belief in the value that achievement is through self-assertion (the downside of which in a Republican government means military “engagement” is demonstrative self-enhancement) is revealed the ideological impetus that underlies the true heroism of the military man, not the Republican patriotic vacuity that risks them for offended hubris.
Lions for Lambs is a reflective look at the War on Terror and Republican culpability in the inadequately planned debacles of military excursions in Afghanistan and, by extension, Iraq. It examines the media’s role in spreading political agendas (indeed its culpability in the Iraq invasion) but works best as a humanist treatment of idealism unfortunately bound by the equivalent of dangerous political war-mongering. Some Republicans were offended by this film: no doubt the film-makers would say “mission accomplished.”
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