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Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio fail to master the Middle East in Ridley Scott's spy thriller Body of Lies |
Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Roger Ferris), Russell Crowe (Ed
Hoffman), Mark Strong (Hani Salaam), Golshifteh Farahani (Aisha), Oscar Isaac
(Bassam), Ali Suliman (Omar Sadiki), Alon Abutbul (Al-Saleem), Vince Colosimo
(Skip), Simon McBurney (Garland), Lubna Azabal (Cala)
Ridley Scott is a bit of a curate’s egg as a director. You
can always expect a film with a certain visual flair, as well as a story that
attempts to tackle big themes and engaging topics. However, it doesn’t always
produce an end result that really grips or feels like something that
particularly stands out from the crowd. That’s what you end up with Body of Lies, a film that constantly
feels like it is on the cusp of saying something important or interesting about
the relationship between East and West, but constantly falls back on the sort
of spy movie tropes it initially feels like it wants to debunk.
In the Middle East, Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a
dedicated CIA operative, with an intricate knowledge of the cultures and issues
of the region. He constantly finds himself frustrated and undermined by his
boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), based in Langley, who is constantly willing to
sacrifice long-term gains for short-term political pay-offs. Assigned to
Jordan, Ferris begins an investigation into a terrorist cell, working closely
with head of Jordanian security Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) – but Hoffman’s
intercessions increasingly cause tension.
Scott’s film is stylish and well assembled, with a great
sense of pace and place. The contrasts between DiCaprio on the ground (in the
dirt, facing dangers and tackling everything from terrorists to rabid dogs) and
Crowe back in the States (rarely if ever seen without a hands-free phone set
dangling from his ear, viewing everything at a distance with no understanding
of the intricacies) is well drawn. The sense of complete cultural
misunderstanding and lack of connection between East and West is established
early, and attempts to cross it generally lead to disaster. The patience and
expertise of the Jordanian security forces is contrasted constantly with the
more slap-dash, hasty efforts of the CIA to meet the same goals. It’s all set
for something quite interesting.
But then the film somehow doesn’t quite come together. Its
episodic structure increasingly stretches out as action moves back and forth
from Jordan to Langley and back again. A particularly wild scheme by Ferris
(which, to the viewer not the film, suggests he is as incompetent and reckless
as Hoffman) turns the film towards the sort of
kidnap/torture/nick-of-time-rescue plotline that wouldn’t look out of place in 24 or James Bond. Basically, the plot
turns on the film transitioning from something with a genuine political
statement to make into the sort of disposal rent-a-spy-thriller that you forget
pretty quickly.
DiCaprio gets a lot of “big” moments to juggle with, as well
as a rather forced romance with a Jordanian nurse (something that he and Golshifteh
Farahani play very well, but seems to have wandered in from an even more
conventional film) but the film works hard to paint him as the “hero” who knows
better than his superiors, despite the film chronicling a string of mistakes.
Crowe enjoys himself as self-important windbag behind a computer, as uncaring
as the institutions he represents.
The real star of the show however is Mark Strong, excellent
as the suave head of Jordanian intelligence, seemingly the only character who
has any understanding about what is going on. With a cool sharpness, slightly
playful politeness and a slight chill of threat, Strong is the film’s most
interesting character. There is a striking point made here that the most
effective person in the film is a Jordanian spy chief with a mixed reputation –
but the film largely shirks the possibility of really using this to demonstrate
how out-of-their-depth the CIA agents are, as if worried that flagging up their
manifest incompetence at every turn would sell badly Stateside.
It’s part of the film’s general lack of soul behind the
skill of its construction. I know Scott is deeply interested in these themes of
East vs West and the culture clashes that develop from it, but it just doesn’t
come out here at all. There was a film to be made here about how the war on
terror has thrown the CIA and the West into a setting they don’t understand,
playing by rules they haven’t been briefed on. But all too often the film
instead settles for telling us the same-old-same-old, padding out its runtime
with spy story clichés and thriller plotting. Scott himself even uses visual
tricks – surveillance drone shots and 24
style action – which suggest that somewhere along the line his heart wasn’t
really in it. Body of Lies could have
been a really interesting thriller about the world today. Instead it’s just
another spy thriller about the war on terror.
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