Lions for Lambs.

"Anyone keen to know why the Democratic party lost the last two general elections - and worried they might still lose the next - should look no further than Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford's shallow, verbose and ultimately convictionless take on the war on terror, a film which pretty much defines the term 'wishy-washy,'" writes Tom Huddleston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"[G]iven the box-office fates of A Mighty Heart, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition and (probably) Lions for Lambs, it might be 30 more years before some liberal executive says, 'Hey, let's put our movies where our mouths are,'" writes David Edelstein in New York. "The new antiwar pictures are all clunks and wind, but they're full of fervent acting and affectingly rough - they lack the usual studio overpolish. Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull."

Updated through 11/9.

"Time Out called Lambs 'Politics For Dummys' and even the Times, which sponsored the world-premiere gala, said, 'You can't fault the anger, but the drama glows as brightly as a five-watt bulb,'" notes Matt Mueller at In the Company of Glenn. "Hate to say it, but they're both right. I wasn't sure what to expect from the first film out of Cruise's revived United Artists label, but - in spite of early warning signs - it wasn't this stagebound theatre piece."

"Lions for Lambs is, to put it mildly, beyond stagey," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "And it runs a brisk 88 minutes in large part because it doggedly, frustratingly refuses to truly delve into the issues it brings up, mistaking newspaper headline-based speeches full of tired talking points for thrilling, incisive debate."

"Boy, this is a cheap-looking picture," sighs Paul Matwychuk. Still, "Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (who also wrote the much flashier Middle East action picture The Kingdom) is onto something with this script. Anyone who's ever mocked George W Bush from the safety of their living-room couch will probably feel their conscience pricked by the film's argument that criticism that isn't backed up with some kind of action - what one might call 'Daily Show activism' - doesn't count for much, especially now, when the global stakes are so high. But Carnahan and Redford's schematic presentation of this theme throws a wet blanket over the entire film."

"It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

John Horn profiles Carnahan for the Los Angeles Times.

Ginny Dougary talks with Redford for the London Times.

Update, 11/6: "Known for making stately, linear films with lovely sunsets, Redford has none of the piss and vinegar, the technical bravura, or the hip irony of younger directors making political films, like Stephen Gaghan or Paul Greengrass," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "His editing is artless, the action scenes listless, the characters almost entirely representational of the political attitudes they strike.... What can I tell you? The movie is awful - and also oddly touching, even adorable in its dogged sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style."

Update, 11/7: "Robert Redford has directed a great movie about a nation losing its sense of purpose, a savage indictment of our increasingly bought-and-paid-for mass media, and a cutting depiction of our country's core values ebbing away while a curiously indifferent American public remains too lazy and distracted to even bother noticing," writes the Philadelphia Weekly. "Unfortunately, the movie I'm talking about was called Quiz Show, and Redford made it 13 years ago. His latest effort Lions for Lambs attempts to tackle all the same subjects, only with a much greater sense of urgency and an absolutely breathtaking absence of artistry."

Updates, 11/8: "[A]mid the torrent of similarly opportunistic fare coming out of Hollywood this fall, Lions for Lambs is the singularly sanctimonious, heavy-handed and counterproductive of the lot," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

"In the best directing of his auteur career, Redford turns Carnahan's original script into a modern-day version of what Sergei Eisenstein called 'Intellectual Montage,'" proposes Armond White in the New York Press. "Not sneaking-in pinko-Clooney cynicism, but an upfront visual dialectic. The three group exchanges (in a faculty office, a Senator's inner sanctum, a secret military mission) alternate the passions of those who observe the war, monitor its execution or actually fight it; their opinions and provocations have head-spinning fervor but are always rooted in character."

"The film, really more a forum than a film..., collects commonplace talk on the issues at hand, things you hear spoken all around you these days, and it crams them into the mouths of tenuously connected, sketchily conceived fictional characters," writes Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader: "('Didn't we also arm Saddam in the 80s?' 'How about a strategy to bring the troops home?' 'Rome is burning, son.' That sort of stuff.) Presented for the most part in a constricted face-shot style, and rather sickly in complexion for so eminent a cinematographer as Philippe Rousselot, it comes to us out of the evident conviction that we are at too critical a time in our history to be bothered with amenities such as art and artfulness, imagination and invention. (Still another indicator, like no shampoo on airplanes, that the terrorists have won.) And - despite an A-list cast of Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford, the last of whom also directed - it logs in at several ticks under ninety minutes, as if any greater elaboration would have dangerously delayed the delivery of the message."

"Robert Redford's direction is so bizarrely airless that Lions's advocates may soon be calling it 'experimental,'" writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "It's a movie that feels like it skipped off-Broadway for reasons unknown.... It's so creaky, so basic-cable in its production values, you have to wonder if it's not meant to be taken at face value."

"[B]etween the three stories, the Cruise-Streep storyline is most fulfilling," writes Omar Mouallem in Vue Weekly. "The other two are either unimportant or uninspired."

"Redford admits, 'I think this film will probably have a rough time getting traction,' a prediction bolstered by the underwhelming box office of In the Valley of Elah and Rendition," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "And that, he worries, may mean that the fall's glut of war-themed films may be followed by another drought."

At Alternet, Sari Gelzer has a guide to all those Iraq movies out there this season.

Updates, 11/9: "It tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mostly it tells us that Mr Redford feels really bad about the state of things. Welcome to the club."

"Lions for Lambs is just about everything I hate in a movie: It's self-righteous, didactic, dramatically and visually static and, in places, extremely boring," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But I found myself thinking about it for hours, even days, after I saw it, which is more than I can say for most of the politically themed fiction movies - In the Valley of Elah, Rendition that have trickled quietly into and out of theaters this fall."

"[I]t gives liberalism such a bad name that on leaving the cinema, I felt like going out and getting a nude study of Norman Podhoretz tattooed on my inner thigh," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"The most aggravating thing about Lions for Lambs isn't its earnest attempt to instruct," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "It's that Carnahan didn't do the research that would've made the details remotely plausible."

"If it weren't for Streep and Cruise, looking like an old lion and a young jackal circling each other warily in the jungle, Lions for Lambs wouldn't feel like a movie at all," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Redford may have played The Candidate once, but Cruise is a guy you get the feeling people will be voting for in the not-too-distant future."

It's "a hopelessly stilted political drama that plays like US News & World Report: The Movie," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Lions for Lambs appears to have been created by someone who's never seen one of these newfangled contraptions called 'movies,' or for that matter, witnessed that phenomenon known as 'speech,'" writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Everyone in the movie talks incessantly... but not a line of dialogue sounds like something that anyone has ever actually said. After a while, the script's denatured quality takes on a fascination of its own: Just how does this earnest, well-intentioned movie, crammed to the rafters with talent, manage to feel so thoroughly phony?"

"Worse, for all of Carnahan's and Redford's attempts to clear the air, Lions for Lambs actually clouds it with the same misguided liberal antiwar strategy that's made the last five years such a battle of political attrition - after standing by or even abetting the Iraq War equivocating dissenters now march to the same 'we love the troops' drumbeat as neocon apologists in order to ensure their moral infallibility," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot.

Adam Balz has a story to tell at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"This is no perfect work of art, but neither is a report from the front," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Its strengths are the strengths of journalism, not the strengths of, say, a Tolstoy novel."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2007 12:20 AM