Roar or bore? Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in Lions for Lambs
One almost feels a little bit sorry for the Hollywood liberalati. It was not so long ago that journalists were complaining about the paucity of celluloid polemic with regard to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Bush's war on terror. Where were the Platoons and Apocalypse Nows for the Iraq and Afghanistan generation?
Then, all of a sudden, as often seems to happen in Tinseltown, everybody and his executive producer was jumping on the political movie bandwagon. We've had Rendition and The Kingdom, both of which met with a fair degree of critical derision. Lions for Lambs, if anything, has received an even more determined mauling than the previous two.
"There's a message behind Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford's latest outing as a director. And my goodness don't we know it by the end of a 94-minute hectoring that feels far, far longer," writes Wendy Ide in the Times, a sentiment echoed in the LA Times, whose Carina Chocano calls the film "dull and self-satisfied".
Our own Peter Bradshaw describes a movie full of "fence-sitting liberal agony", and not much else. "[It's] a muddled and pompous film about America's war on terror, which seeks to counter neo-con belligerence with a mixture of injured sensitivity and a shrill, pre-emptive patriotism of its own," he writes. "It gives liberalism such a bad name that on leaving the cinema, I felt like going out and getting a nude study of Norman Podhoretz tattooed on my inner thigh."
Somewhat bizarrely, it falls to that well-known symposium of liberal discussion, The Sun, to heap praise on Robert Redford's film. The tabloid's film writer, who is known only as The Sneak (we're guessing he was cheaper than Johnny Vaughan) writes: "The conversation between Cruise and Streep has a totally authentic feel. Cruise gives one of his greatest performances as the smooth-tongued Republican. In fact, his winning smile and arguments are so persuasive they almost undermine the film's anti-Bush message."
The view from the blogosphere is also a little kinder. "Lions for Lambs ... is the most frank discussion yet about the war and the state of this country I've seen at the movies, one that tries to capture the situation realistically and intelligently and without indulging in dogmatic ideology," writes Mary Ann Johanson of Flickfilosopher. "If it made me both sad and hopeful at the same time, well, that's because there isn't going to be an easy answer, and it's going to take us longer to dig ourselves out than it took us to dig ourselves in."
How about you? Did Lions for Lambs make you sad? Or just rather upset that you parted with hard-earned cash to watch a movie so woolly it might have been better off as a nice knitted jumper, as opposed to a 90-minute study in how to send your audience to sleep? Not that we're biased.
