TV talk shows featuring the three stars of Lions For Lambs - Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise - piqued great interest in their new film. However, I found Lions For Lambs lame, to put it simply, or, a rip-off, to put it rudely. Redford and Cruise have the perfect vehicle with which to air the dirty laundry of the politics of war. Instead Redford oversimplifies a red-hot-button issue into a uniform, neatly folded stack of clothes that the average audience will not unfold and wear.
Lions For Lambs has been hyped, by the right, to be a hot-button issue movie. Why? Because Redford made this movie and clearly adds his two cents to the Iraq War quagmire. He also displays disdain for the military plans and planners behind the war. I think the great métier for this movie would be to give back and to give credit and power where it is due, to activists, online, on the streets, and in makeshift camps outside ranches, where America is searching its political soul. Those people are not represented in this movie. And I predict they won’t care about Lions For Lambs' ultimately lame message.
I anticipate a place where the right and left wing could safely face off, stand up, sit down, chat up, and debate the issues with no holds barred. I look for revelation and instead get strong opinion about something Americans are steaming mad about: the War on Terror. Yes, we are mad, yes, we do care. So why couldn't these three gifted stars deliver a movie where we could feel this anger? They did try, but Lions for Lambs is not that movie. Though its tri-member high-power cast make it watchable, the sets are sterile, staged, unreal, uninviting, and the message watered down.
This movie is really three well-acted stories with six characters. But, in the end, it boils down to six talking heads. Robert Redford directs and plays the composite caring professor (Stephen Malley), of what we are not sure - perhaps politics, perhaps philosophy. Streep plays the composite caring Jewish veteran journalist (Janine Roth). Cruise plays the uncaring, composite, pompous GOP senator from Illinois (Jasper Irving). And the third story involves Malley’s two former students, one black, one Latino.
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