Body of Lies opens with a quote about evil begetting evil. But try as you might, you will not be able to come to a conclusion about who drew first blood. Whether the wicked chicken or the malevolent egg came first is entirely in the eye of the beholder in this slick, genuinely thoughtful but ultimately disappointing new thriller.
Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is our man in the Middle East. An expert on Arabic culture and fluent in multiple languages, the CIA field officer knows his way around the treacherous streets of a dozen Middle Eastern cities. He has spent years uncovering terrorist cells and feeding that information back to Langley. The man on the other end of that line is Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), primarily a desk jockey, who manipulates his chess pieces — Ferris especially — from a laptop with cold and pragmatic aplomb. Seeing the “war on terror” as an assault on Western Civilization himself, the blunt Hoffman earns Ferris’ enmity with the way in which he treacherously uses and discards his human assets.
Someone is detonating bombs across Europe and the CIA suspects the ruthless terrorist mastermind Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul) whose signature is that he never takes credit for his work. In order to draw him out, Ferris devises a cunning plan — invent a fictitious rival terrorist organization and let jealousy do the rest. Flushing Al-Saleem out of hiding requires Ferris to befriend the urbane and sophisticated, Savile Row-draped head of Jordanian intelligence Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) who has nothing but contempt for Hoffman but sees in Ferris a man of integrity, street smarts and cultural sensitivity.
At one point in the story, Ferris befriends a Jordanian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani). The relationship exists for no other reason than to set up the film’s endgame motivation. Sure, it humanizes Ferris and shows that beneath his no-nonsense exterior beats the heart of a man, but as Body of Lies goes to great lengths to show the tremendous cultural difficulties the American man and the Muslim woman face in even the most innocent of social exchanges, the film creates a situation at odds with everything we know about the savvy field operative. It is almost as if the scenes between Ferris and the nurse were written by a different screenwriter. Our Ferris would never allow himself to be so blatantly manipulated by his own emotions, no matter how badly he yearned for human contact, female or otherwise.
While Crowe phones in his performance (literally, he is on the phone for the majority of the time he is on screen), DiCaprio continues to electrify. Cut from much the same mold as his character in Blood Diamond, DiCaprio is responsible for conveying most of the intensity and urgency that saturates this film. Screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed), adapting the novel by the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, creates Ferris as an idealized white knight in a very black world, a black world that extends well beyond the shadowy alleys of the Middle East to the corridors of CIA headquarters itself. The film is a study of contrasts — between Arabs and Americans, between impetuosity and patience, between young and old, between rich and poor, between macro and micro, between modernity and antiquity.
One of the hinge pins to understanding this film comes when Hoffman describes the cultural clash in the Middle East as a confrontation between people coming back in time from the distant future, laden with technology that borders on the miraculous, and those who choose to live in a past steeped in simplicity and tradition. So it is a great irony then, when the men from the future find that despite all their technology and all their advanced civilization, they are routed when their enemy chooses not to engage them on their advanced terms. In the end, intelligence, like anything in life, is not about superior technology, but about sophisticated human relationships.
Body of Lies is the sort of movie that will keep you thinking for hours after the lights come up. Dense and convoluted, it is crafted in such a way that no matter how many times the action hops from one part of the globe to another, we never lose sight of what’s going on. The movie is superbly made, tightly drawn and often insightful. And yet, like the intelligence officers it portrays, Body of Lies uses double-crosses and slight of hand to conceal a fairly formulaic story and a climax as offensively conventional as it gets. When it matters most, Body of Lies takes the easy way out.
Director Ridley Scott is obviously fascinated by the clash of civilizations taking place in the Middle East. Together with the superb Black Hawk Down and the woefully underrated Kingdom of Heaven, Scott uses his latest film to continue to peel back the layers of violence, paranoia and xenophobia. Scott’s reality is principally grim and unsettling — a world of mutual distrust and contempt. War is a nasty, repugnant business. Very few people are innocent or clean. And usually, those who become collateral damage are those who least deserve it.
If this is winning, he seems to be asking, what does losing look like?
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.