Syriana (2005)
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
The Middle Eastern oil industry is the backdrop of this tense drama, which weaves together numerous story lines. Bennett Holiday is an American lawyer in charge of facilitating a dubious merger of oil companies, while Bryan Woodman, a Switzerland-based energy analyst, experiences both personal tragedy and opportunity during a visit with Arabian royalty. Meanwhile, veteran CIA agent Bob Barnes uncovers an assassination plot with unsettling origins.
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23 films that influenced Syriana
What critics say influenced Syriana
Though Gaghan cites Costa-Gavras's “Z” and American political films of the 1970s as sources of inspiration, his film is very different.
Fiercely partisan political thrillers have generally been the province of great incendiary European directors like Costa-Gavras ("Z") and Gillo Pontecorvo ("Battle of Algiers").
Clooney plays an updated role of the CIA agents and investigators that Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had played in the conspiracy films of the 1970s, such as “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
As important now as "Three Days of the Condor" or "The Manchurian Candidate" were in their time, "Syriana" does for the oil industry what "Traffic" did for the drug trade.
A lot of Altman films like " Nashville " and " Short Cuts " use the technique.
But unlike films such as "Shortcuts" and "Nashville," "Syriana" engages in so much complexity and so much depth that to fully comprehend the plot, you may need a master's in political science.
“Syriana” was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan , who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for “Traffic,” another hyperlink movie.
Mr. Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), about the cross-border drug trade between the United States and Mexico, a more amenable subject for multi-character intrigues than the global miasma of Syriana.
From writer/director Steven Gaghan, the Academy Award winning writer of "Traffic," "Syriana" pushes the boundaries of political correctness.
Writer/director Stephen Gaghan returns to familiar waters with "Syriana," a complex geopolitical quilt of stories and characters that aims to do for oil what his Oscar-winning "Traffic" script did for narcotics.
The first-time director’s approach is nothing new, especially if you’ve seen Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” for which Gaghan received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Gaghan's script has, mostly, even greater courage in its convictions than his fine, Oscar-winning template for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but as a director, he lacks Soderbergh's ability to blend quotidian impressions with dramatic turning-points, so that we have a closer sense of how every level of life is a node within this system.
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Clooney plays an updated role of the CIA agents and investigators that Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had played in the conspiracy films of the 1970s, such as “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
First, a beautiful and stylish woman named Suha (Lubna Azabal) walks nervously through a West Bank border patrol, in a scene directly reminiscent of those overplayed checkpoint melodramas in Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention , the last Palestinian drama that provoked me about equally in good and bad directions.
The storytelling in Syriana is as murky as in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), except that there's more at stake here, e.g., the audience's belief in the good faith of the American government.
The film's structure, though hardly as radical as some have suggested (comparisons to Tarantino's Pulp Fiction are inapt, since elaborate time shifts are not part of the concept), is unusual in that it presents the viewer with a number of stories unfolding at the same time.
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A lot of Altman films like " Nashville " and " Short Cuts " use the technique.
But unlike films such as "Shortcuts" and "Nashville," "Syriana" engages in so much complexity and so much depth that to fully comprehend the plot, you may need a master's in political science.
I believe that much of Oliver Stone's JFK is well constructed fiction, but that doesn't prevent it from being compelling and a source of endless speculation and interest.
The frenetic pace makes you feel Stoned, as in director Oliver, who might applaud the film's sensory assault to the region of the brain that induces drool over intrigue and background dealings in the manner of "JFK."