Body of Lies

“Body of Lies”

USA. 2008. Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay by William Monahan. Based on a novel written by David Ignatius. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Ali Suliman, Alon Abutbul, Vince Colosimo, Simon McBurney, Mehdi Nebbou and Michael Gaston.

Rating: **½

Bewildering modern day politics and Hollywood movie conventions battle for screen time in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, the latest thriller to literally “rip from today’s headlines,” as the saying goes. The confusion of the story is apt for the fiercely labyrinthine nature of the war on terror, from the cultural barriers to the occasionally careless situational misapprehension. What is film oddly lacks is a consistent sense of urgency about it all.

That is not to say the movie is a complete bust. It is just that there are too many generic movie conventions that really refuse to give way when they should. Director Ridley Scott and his writer, William Monahan (who won an Oscar for the Infernal Affairs remake, The Departed) may claim otherwise, as Scott himself said, “It’s not James Bond with lots of people running around.” But when the main central protagonist, Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a lone hero type globe-trotting in multiple languages, dodging and/or surviving all matter of explosions, gun battles and even brutal torture, and even falling in love with a local woman, we cannot quite believe the situation to be as close to the bone and as far removed from James Bond as the movie is clearly trying to be.

The movie opens with a massive, horrific suicidal bombing that rips through Manchester, England, after the terrorists sense a counter-raid into their hideout. We then meet Ferris as a CIA field agent who runs around making contacts in order to dig up information on this terrorist group led by Al-Saleem (Alon Abutbul). He knows several languages and speaks Arabic fluently enough to be able to disguise as a local but his best efforts are often hampered by his CIA superior, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), who seemingly just plays by his own rules often without heeding attention to the proper intelligence and insight that Ferris provides him.

This annoys Ferris who, on the ground, believes that a better tie of friendship with the Jordanian intelligence chief, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) will aid his cause. While he works closer with Salaam despite some distractions from Hoffman and somehow finds time to see a local nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), who had earlier treated his injuries, Ferris secretly conjures up an insane plan to frame an innocent architect of being a head of a fake terrorist faction. Perhaps then, he believes, this will incite envy and jealousy in Al-Saleem’s real terrorist group and will thus bring them out of hiding.

As the plot description indicates, the movie clicks off numerous locations and director Scott, as usual, gives us a real sense of time and place. Working with cinematographer Alexander Witt and filming mainly around Morocco, he slickly captures the scorching environs that parallel and envelop these political hot zones. From a purely technical and visual standpoint, his approach here probably most closely resembles his great 2001 war film, Black Hawk Down in that he is trying to put us at ground level with the war on terror much like he similarly did with the conflict in Somalia.

The key difference though is that he refused to single out anyone as a de facto hero in that movie and could thus really heighten and even drain the audience with the surging tension and mortality in combat. The fact that this one, as adapted and penned by writer William Monahan from a novel by David Ignatius, has far too easy and conventional characters in the center goes against the realistic atmosphere it is trying to portray. DiCaprio, fine actor as he is, has tried and sometimes succeeded shedding off his pretty boy naïveté in his past movies but, beyond the James Bond-like traits he possesses, his character here is really written and acted as too earnest and sincere. Since the movie does not really suggest a back story for this guy, it would have worked better for Roger to really project more world-weariness to better hint at his experience and cynicism as in a John LeCarre novel or even George Clooney’s character in Syriana. And the character is only made less plausible by the unconvincing romance he shares with Farahani’s Aisha (is there a requirement that DiCaprio have a love interest in almost any film he is in?) including the obligatory but completely false scene when he meets her family and clashes with her sister about politics.

Those elements end up robbing some of the chemistry that could have sparked between him and Russell Crowe, who is aptly deviously relaxed as his CIA superior who unwaveringly believes that the ends justify any and all questionable means he employs. The two actors only have a few scenes face to face and mostly have continual phone conversations (often while Crowe’s character is busy taking care of his family and bringing his kids to school) but somehow we sense that the movie is perhaps going too far with making them utter opposites in their lines of work. That makes their characters not only more increasingly predictable but also less believable that the two would work together or even rub each other away like sandpaper since they don’t ever seem to really find common ground (beyond agreeing on that insane scheme to frame an innocent man as a terrorist, which ends up having some ruinous consequences).

The best character and performance in the movie is from Mark Strong playing the Jordanian intelligence chief who is really the smartest guy in the room. He says up front to Roger that he has only one rule: “Never lie to me,” and based on that and Roger’s next actions, we sense he really is the wild card of the story (despite the fact that he has far too few scenes in the movie). And, while not exactly novel, it is through his character that the delivery of the film’s ideas that modern-day America should learn to rely more on international ties to accomplish its goals is most effective.

Body of Lies certainly has more of a mind than last year’s political thriller, The Kingdom, which literally blew up in our faces with a long, massive, confusing shootout in the end (though this one has a few violent thriller-style action scenes, to be sure). Mainstream Hollywood, however, still often seems to play it too safe and too loose in dealing with the current political climate (and a much more ambitious studio film like Steven Gaghan's Syriana that really solely tries to embrace the political intrigue and complexity is a true rarity). The result is a film that you say was somewhat interesting but then just kind of shrug off.