This Week's Hot Pick: 'Syriana'

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

George Clooney won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as a CIA agent who stumbles on an ill-advised U.S. plot, driven by oil-industry greed, to create a regime change in a Persian Gulf emirate.

He gives a credible and deeply sympathetic performance as an agent who speaks Farsi and knows his way around the Middle East, but gradually finds he's only a clueless pawn.

And he's just one of a vast cast in a film that writer/director Stephen Gaghan has made so fragmented and complicated that it's hard to follow and reduces his message to little more than a cry of despair. It's too bad because it's so rare for a big Hollywood star vehicle to take on subjects as touchy as the politics of oil and the American quagmire in the Middle East.

Gaghan's complex tapestry of individual sagas starts out with no obvious connection but very gradually comes together -- in the manner of his Oscar-winning script for "Traffic." The cast includes Matt Damon, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, David Clennon, Mark Strong, Mazhar Munir, Alexander Siddig, Akbar Kurtha, Amanda Peet, William Charles Mitchell, William Hurt and Tim Blake Nelson.

The drama that brings them all together is a giant oil-company merger that will benefit neither the American consumer nor the people of the Middle East, and which has to be facilitated by the assassination of the region's single visionary leader. At a time of record oil prices and profits and of American casualties in Iraq, nothing could be more timely than a film that tries to lay bare behind-the-scenes avarice and political expediency. Yet "Syriana" is so scattered and complicated that it doesn't have much impact.

DVD extras include a conversation with Clooney, deleted scenes and a featurette. It comes in both full screen and widescreen. 126 minutes. Rated R for violence and language. (William Arnold)

GRADE: C+