Lions for Lambs

Movie Review 
By David A Thomas

Seven Movies From2007Worth Seeing

There are several important movies from 2007 that I have not critiqued in this journal. Out of the ones that I could have chosen, I will discuss seven, with a note explaining why each has important social texts and ethical implications.

 Three IraqWar Movies. Even with the Iraq War still in progress, this past year Hollywood made several probing feature movies about the conflict. The more substantive choices tended not to be box office hits.

1. Rendition is the story of a scientist who was “rendered” (i.e., taken out of the country) by U. S. forces as a security risk, to an unnamed North African prison for harsh interrogation that would be illegal domestically. The suspect is stripped, isolated, beaten, and shocked. The movie includes some graphic scenes of “waterboarding.” The movie is clearly a commentary on the issue of torture. After a series of denials, the interrogation produces a manifestly false confession. The movie leaves open the bare possibility that the suspect just might possibly be guilty of something. Viewers are left to make their own judgments about torture as an instrument of official U. S. policy against terrorism, with precious little data to base a decision on, except that “waterboarding” and the rest of the torture techniques are bad, and they probably yield false information anyway. The movie played during the height of public hearings over Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’ defense of the Bush administration’s position on torture.

2. Lions for Lambs is a thoughtful, sophisticated script directed by  Robert Redford. The movie is structured as a three-act drama with a different cast and theme for each act. The three parts are connected loosely by the coincidental circumstance of happening simultaneously during a time frame of about an hour. In one act, Tom Cruise is a hawkish Senator being interviewed by veteran cynical newscaster Meryl Streep about the latest new Neocon strategy being implemented to win the Afghan War once and for all. (It sounds like an Afghan version of the “surge.”) Their interview is very stimulating, with the major real political issues about the war clearly articulated by both sides. The second act is a combat scene involving a Marine assault on an Afghan target, which is the point attack for the new strategy under discussion. Due to an intelligence SNAFU, that mission comes to grief. The third and primary scene entails a liberal history professor (Redford) having a Dutch Uncle chat with his promising but slacker student over why he should become more engaged in the vital issues of the day, including the war. As luck would have it, the two Marines at the center of the Act II skirmish were former students of the professor. This movie is an excellent choice for a church discussion group.

3. In the Valley of Elah is my personal favorite among the war movies. Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon are the parents of a young returning Iraq War veteran who suddenly goes missing in a stateside assignment. Played out as a police procedural, as events unfold, it turns out that members of the young man’s unit were involved in his fate. The movie respects the patriotism of those who support the war (Jones), yet clearly shows that the results of the war as actually being fought and experienced in Iraq are psychologically debilitating on the participants. The young man’s life in combat conditions are reflected by the plot device of using the horrific pictures recovered from his cell phone. To me, it is clearly a movie about PTSD. The biblical allusion in the title is merely incidental to the story. The movie has a memorable image of the US flag being flown upside down at the local high school at both the beginning and the ending of the movie, symbolizing our national distress over this prolonged war.

Four Other Ethical Movies. One of the year’s best movies is

1. The GreatDebaters, starring Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker. Do not be misled into thinking this is a static, dull movie about academic debate. It is a civil rights movie through and through. The story, based on an actual event, is about Wiley College, a small Black college in Texas during the Great Depression, that beat the national champions at Harvard. (In fact, it was Southern Cal.) But the real “great debaters” of the story are the tough debate coach (Washington), a hot blooded farm labor organizer, and the more cautious Methodist college president (Whitaker), over the ethics of civil rights activism in a dangerous Jim Crow era. In real life, the college president was the father of James Farmer, Jr., who subsequently went on to found CORE, a pioneering civil rights group in the South. James Farmer, Jr., was one of the school’s debaters that year. It’s just a great, inspirational movie, and a great commentary on civil rights. When I attended, the audience broke into spontaneous applause in the middle and again at the end. Take your teenagers.

2. No Country for Old Men is a modern day western based on a novel by America’s leading serious novelist, Cormac McCarthy, who was recently nominated for a Nobel Prize. The theme of the story is the overwhelming domination of individuals in our society by the bad guys who have superior technological weapons. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging traditional West Texas sheriff who has difficulty coping with the massive drug trade spilling over the Mexican border through his county. Javier Bardem, Spain’s greatest actor, plays a hit man who will probably join Hannibal Lector as one of the screen’s most memorable villains. The movie is very violent and not for the squeamish.

3. Juno is a small independent film about a pregnant teenager who confronts her moral issues of dealing with her parents, her boyfriend, and the prospective adoptive parents for her unborn baby. It’s a very honest, candid movie, with some light touches, though it never trivializes the basic situation. Juno does not come up with any pat answers. Given that the girl ought not to have become pregnant, but she did, so what then? Audiences will probably acknowledge the practical wisdom of the choices everyone ultimately makes. Juno will appeal to a lot of families, and it will generate frank discussions.

4. Finally, my personal favorite movie of last year is Into the Wild. Based on a nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer, the movie is about a bright young man who abandoned his privileged upper class life to go off “into the wild” to find his identity and passion in the 1990s. It is a difficult movie to describe succinctly, but let me characterize it by saying that it is a textbook example of the monomyth, or the life path of every young man who leaves home, experiences many adversities, is taught by many mentors, and learns wisdom. In this case, the story ends tragically when the young man eventually starves to death in the wilds of Alaska. Along the way, he meets all of the major quirky archetypal figures that populate a good quest story and makes many mistakes due to his hardheaded naivete. Nevertheless, the movie conveys themes of redemption and atonement. On top of that, it is brilliantly adapted and directed by Sean Penn. The cast is superb, especially Emile Hirsch in the leading role, Hal Holbrook as the wise old man, and Catherine Keener as a retro hippie who served the young man as a surrogate loving mother figure.

1 David A. Thomas retired in 2004 and now resides in Sarasota, Florida, and he invites your comments at davidthomas1572@comcast.net