STUDIO: United Artists
RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2008
STARRING: Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke, Michael Peña, and Andrew Garfield
WRITTEN BY: Matthew Michael Carnahan
DIRECTED BY: Robert Redford
FEATURES: Audio Commentary with Director Robert Redford
The Making of Lions for Lambs
Script to Screen
"UA Legacy" Featurette

Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs aims to raise a spirited and open-minded discourse about the war, through a series of three evolving scenes, taking place in separate arenas - politics/media, academia and the frontline. The first scene captures an interview taking place between an aging, left-wing reporter (Meryl Streep) and a soon-to-be powerful, Republican senator (Tom Cruise). The senator has invited her into his office, in an attempt to get her to abandon the type of negative criticism in which the media specializes and write about the new, aggressive military strategy he has just launched. In the second, an idealistic college professor (Robert Redford) has called into his office a talented, yet spoiled and apathetic student (Andrew Garfield), in the hope of convincing him to get involved in the world around him and make something of himself. The third scene takes place in Afghanistan, where two soldiers and best friends (Derek Luke and Michael Peña) are embarking on a dangerous mission into untested territory. The movie cuts back and forth between all three of these stories at five minute intervals throughout the film.

With all of the above taking place simultaneously, over the course of a relatively short film (90 min.), you might wonder how Redford manages to keep the entire thing from derailing? Answer: he doesn’t. Redford tries way too hard to cram in each and every potential angle of this ongoing discussion and comes up empty-handed. In the director’s commentary included on the disc, Redford tells us how important he thinks it is that a film like this raises questions, rather than answers them and gets the audience thinking, rather than preaches at them. In order to achieve that, he was insistent that each of his characters make strong, seemingly sensible arguments, so that we might find ourselves truly considering all that each one says. But while it’s true that the film, overall, refrains from producing a single, clear viewpoint on the issues at stake, it consists of various characters with conflicting viewpoints doing just that - preaching at one another and thus, in a sense, at us! Some of the ideas presented are intriguing ones, but within seconds after hearing one, an opposite one is hurled our way with just as much as force. It’s all quite overwhelming.

Redford always seems to enjoy mixing up the old with the new - big stars and longtime, industry friends with rookies and virtual unknowns. It’s an admirable quality and one that probably helps to keep filmmaking thrilling for him, after all these years. With Lions for Lambs, he has chosen a script written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who had penned only one other film thus far, last year’s The Kingdom. Impressively, Carnahan gets much of the dialogue right. Most of what is said sounds believable. But sadly, the way in which this story unfolds and the underlying ideas reveal themselves does not work because the pacing of the film feels off. Often, in movies that follow the storylines of more than one character, the individual plots tend to ebb and flow in unison, dramatically speaking. Yet here, each of the three stories seems to reach its own fever pitch at different points throughout the second half of the film. Being jerked back and forth between different stories in various parts of the world can be jarring enough, if not handled extremely carefully. But when handled clumsily as it often feels they are here, it’s damn near death to hopes of maintaining an audience’s interest.

The DVD includes three Redford-oriented features, two short documentaries and the ubiquitous directorial commentary. But I was surprised by the amount of material overlapping between each of them. Although all three pieces consist of separate footage/recordings, Redford explains many of the same things in each of them. He also explains a number of his directorial methods, ones I’d imagine most viewers would find to be fairly common and obvious, as though they were risky and original. Strangely enough, during the commentary, he also slips in a few left-leaning, political opinions. And whether or not I agreed with them personally, their existence actually undermines his attempts to make a wartime film full of non-biased, thought provoking questions. So while we all know that Redford can certainly be one of the smartest, most sensitive directors we’ve got, watching most of the extras here just made me feel as though I was being talked at - fitting, considering that’s my main problem with Lions for Lambs. I admire him for trying to make a complex film in such complicated times. But in the end, his desire to make simultaneous, strong arguments for each viewpoint on every aspect of the situation fails to produce a dialogue and emerges simply as a mess of conflicting speeches and lectures.