Body Of Lies“Body Of Lies” has a great script. Writer William Monahan (from the weak “Kingdom Of Heaven” and the excellent “The Departed”) manages to craft a story with just the right amount of complexity, political relevance and action, failing just at the ending, which is believable and well-tied, but feels ultimately like the wrong ending, thematically and emotionally speaking. Regardless, the script is, as a whole, well-balanced and filled with great exchanges and some fascinating scenes.
Maybe the reason this was branded a “generic espionage thriller” by so many critics is the director Ridley Scott, who has, in the late stages of his career, adopted a film-making style that lacks any sophistication. His visual structure consists basically of establishing shots, close-ups, nervous camera-work and a lack of any deeper meaning or subtlety. You could say this is perfect for a espionage thriller. I ask: why?
Why is it that a espionage thriller needs confusing action scenes, a shaking camera and excessive cutting? These are all cheap, simulated ways of creating a sense of urgency, which is something you do by having us care about the characters, not by putting the camera inside a washing machine.
The CIA is pursuing the terrorist Al-Saleem, who has recently claimed responsability for a bombing in Manchester that failed to get the right target, but got a lot of others nonetheless. The agent on the ground is Ferris (DiCaprio), a fast-thinking, intense young man who speaks perfect Arabic and can see the whole thing happening right in front of his eyes, as opposed to his analyst, Hoffman (Crowe), who constantly gives away orders while busy with his kids back in the USA, leading a far calmer and safer life, which creates serious operational gaps between him and his agent.
The chemistry between characters is one of this film’s highlights. Despite being constantly screwed by Hoffman, the way Ferris talks to him makes clear they have known each other for a long time and have an underlying friendship. It’s noticeable especially when Ferris gives up trying to be angry at Hoffman and jokingly knocks him off his chair. But Ferris, far from being stupid, knows precisely the danger Hoffman represents when trying to cross his own operations with his, which results in a brilliant scene where an agent makes contact with a target and Ferris realizes he belongs neither to himself or to the allied Jordanian Intelligence, but to Hoffman.
Still, Hoffman displays some moments of cold, but ultimately prudent attitude, like when Ferris feels sorry for a terrorist who was ordered to be in a suicide bombing and wants to pull out and go to America (while still having all the destructive beliefs of a terrorist, just too much of a coward to die for them) and Hoffman says something like, “He’s a terrorist a-hole who wanted to go to Disneyland.” And from an intelligence standpoint, it’s hard not to agree with him, human rights notwithstanding.
And then there’s the leader of the Jordanian Intelligence, Hani (Strong). Far more competent than Hoffman, he protagonizes one of the best scenes in the film, when he gains a man’s service not by threatening to kill his mother, but by giving her a nice apartment, earning the man’s respect while not letting him forget he can still kill her or him any time he likes. Basically, he assumes, to that man, the role of a god with power over everything in his life. Another character defining moment is when Hani reveals not to believe in torture (“A man will say anything to make the pain stop”) and then shows Ferris a man being whipped inside a room. “I thought you didn’t believe in torture, Hani,” says Ferris, to which Hani replies, “Punishment, my dear. A very different thing.”
His meeting with Hoffman is another of the film’s highlights, and where the acting truly shines: Crowe, as Hoffman, is almost cartoonish in his depiction of a laid-back, not-a-care-in-the-world CIA analyst. There’s manipulation in every syllable he utters, and why hide it? He’s a fucking CIA analyst. As a result, Crowe’s “light” performance is much more disturbing than a serious one due to sheer act of imagining men like him in charge of Middle East operations in real life.
Mark Strong invests on a constantly relaxed, serene character, which constrasts heavily with the moments he is upset without the need for the actor to do more than simply gaze intensely. It’s an incredibly subtle performance that makes the character earns the audience’s respect almost as soon as the first scene he’s in — which makes it easy to understand why Ferris respects him so much as well.
Finally, Leonardo DiCaprio closes the main cast with his intense and believable performance. Never trying to look cool, the actor gives Agent Ferris a number of human touches, like the desperate way he screams when his feet are being bitten by dogs (James Bond would have preferred to die rather than give that sign of weakness). DiCaprio can tell you what his character is thinking just with his eyes, which is the mark of a good actor.
The plot proceeds with good pacing and interestingly, thanks to Monahan — complex to just the right degree, and almost disturbingly clear. It’s especially interesting how none of the sides are stupid — when a character is kidnapped by terrorists, the terrorists circle around the character using their cars, in order to create a mini sand storm the American cameras are not capable of seeing through. Monahan is also smart in avoiding obvious foreshadowing — when Hani says “Never lie to me,” I thought, “He will be lied to in the movie’s ending,” but Hani is lied to on practically the very NEXT scene, which gives the movie a feeling of unpredictability that sets it apart from most thrillers.
Monahan even finds time for a romantic subplot, something I usually hate, but he does it right. At first it might sound unbelievable for an agent on the field to consider romance, but considering Ferris is so weary and tired, this little indulgence serves more as character development than anything else. And Monahan also avoids preachiness by incorporating political commentary organically on the plot — it rarely feels forced, and when it does, it’s forgivable.
As aforementioned, he only slips on the ending, and I’m not sure this is his or Scott’s fault, since Monahan, after all, wrote “The Departed”, and anyone who’s seen that film’s ending will give the screenwriter the benefit of the doubt. “Body Of Lies” has an ending that is believable, coincides with the characters’ motivations and abilities, but thematically speaking, feels hollow. But since it’s not a shoehorned, dumb ending, it doesn’t subtract from the film — but doesn’t enrich it, either.
The main problem of the film is really Scott and his editor Pietro Scalia. Always abusing cuts and excessively close camera angles, they make the dialogue scenes understandable and interesting by focusing on the actors’ excellent performances with their close ups, but fail on the action scenes, especially a car chase on the desert. I highlight the following moment, when a terrorist fires an RPG prior to his own car being blown up by a chopper missile. His RPG hits the car they were chasing a second after that. Scott and Scalia depict this in a series of unecessarily fast cuts (and a very dodgy CGI shot of the car overturning), as they do with most action scenes — and even explosions, which are shown in a variety of different angles as if the audience has trouble understanding it’s a fucking explosion. Scott needs to stop being so indecisive and CHOOSING ONE OR TWO ANGLES to portray things from rather than trying to include so many. But at least, his direction is far from being as chaotic as his brother’s, Tony Scott, or one of his “disciples”, the weak Peter Berg from “The Kingdom”.
Mind you, Scott doesn’t direct the film BADLY. Far from it, he’s always been competent, and him and Scalia deserve credit for helping Monahan tell an acceptably complex story, but also clear. It’s just time to evolve from “Black Hawk Down” and try a new visual structure, since this one has proved itself formulaic and almost automatic.
The result of this, of course, is the feeling of “generic”. This is not helped by Alexander Witt’s cinematography, which invests in the typical “yellow for the Middle East, blue for Washington” tones of most films in the genre, but still it is good cinematography, especially the beautiful shot in strong yellow tones that shows a soldier dodging a car blown by an RPG as Hoffman recites the interesting monologue that opens the film.
This “generic but competent” thing can’t be said of Marc Streitenfeld’s soundtrack, which is just generic. It does its job but lacks personality and in some moments I felt like I was watching “Team America” (which heavily satirized some instruments commonly used for Middle East themes).
So “Body Of Lies” is a film that looks generic, but is actually a good espionage flick with some brilliant scenes and something to say. It most definitely works as entertainment and food for thought, is incredibly well-acted with good dialogue and suffers only from an ending that could have been so much better and powerful and a director who fell in love with a filmmaking style he immensely helped to develop but that’s become overused and cliched.
Written by André Navarro on September 20th 2009
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Last updated: 2009-12-22 12:24:03 by andre_navarro
