Common Sense Note
This movie isn't for kids as the plot and themes are too complex and mature. Parents should know it includes several disturbing scenes, including the accidental electrocution/drowning of a young boy in a swimming pool (including the mother's distress); a torture scene in which a character's fingernails are pulled out; and a CIA missile strike against a car convoy (explosion and aftermath featuring bloody, burning bodies). The film focuses in part on a CIA agent who orchestrates assassinations; U.S. oil company executives and lawyers also conspire to arrange violence; and a young Pakistani becomes a suicide bomber (last pictured as he heads toward a U.S. ship). Characters curse, drink, and smoke.
Families can discuss the interrelationships between personal/moral and public/ political decisions. How are government and corporate policies linked and at odds? How are the several father-and-son relationships like and unlike each other? Does Bob's seeming effort to save Prince Nasir affect your opinion of his work as a CIA agent?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Complicated and intelligent, SYRIANA focuses on multiple storylines involving corporate and official energy deals, and various sorts of betrayals. The film is built on fine performances and difficult positions, a mature, provocative look at global machinations performed by small-minded men.
The movie's moral center is Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a veteran CIA agent who's recently begun to doubt the morality of his work. When Bob's bosses at Langley decide that he's off his game, they worry. They need to keep him in play; he knows too much ("He's gotta stop with the memos"). To cut losses, they make a strategic, expedient choice: they'll deplete Bob until he's dead.
Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana thrillers -- where the good man rebels against his evil government employers -- in fact, Bob's moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. He's not a conventionally good man, but a desperate, dedicated, and eventually, broken one.
When Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) makes an oil deal with China instead of the U.S. company Connex, Bob's bosses send him to oversee the young sheik's assassination. Connex moves to merge with the smaller Killen, owned by Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper), which now has drilling rights in Kazakhstan. Pope is an old-school Texas oilman ("My daddy was a wild-catter, nobody ever gave me shit"), and used to getting his way. The merger will make the two companies, together, the world's fifth largest oil and gas company (which translates to the 23rd largest GNP, that is, humungous).
The shift to Chinese ownership has far-reaching effects, of course, including worker layoffs in the Gulf. When Pakistani migrant Ahmed Kahn (Shahid Ahmed) and his son Wasim (Mazhar Munir) lose their work permits, the younger man and his best friend Farooq (Sonnell Dadral) seek ways to act on their anger and frustration, becoming grim case studies in the making of suicide bombers. As the film's tagline has it, "Everything is connected."
The Justice Department sics Washington law firm Sloan Whiting on Killen's Kazakhstan contract. Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer) sends Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) to gather exploitable intel and set up for a second deal with Nasir's callow brother Prince Meshal (Akbar Kurtha). While Nasir advocates women's rights and sharing the wealth, Meshal is a more familiar -- not to say stereotypical -- trade partner, essentially and readably dishonest, predictable and manipulable. Ben's father (William C. Mitchell) regularly turns up on his son's townhouse stoop, drunk and miserable; the son turns his sense of guilt around, dealing with racism by playing his rich white employers' game with as much cutthroat disloyalty as they do.
One more father-son plot involves energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), whose weekend at Prince Nasir's Geneva home ends in tragedy (the accidental death of his young son). When Nasir feels badly about the accident, and brings Bryan on as his own policy consultant, the naïve American tells himself that he now has a chance to make energy a force for progressive politics.
The problem is that the system is not set up for progressive anything. Corruption, as Pope's lobbyist Danny Dalton (Tim Blake Nelson) puts it, is not deviation but business as usual. "Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation... Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm." If some sons can learn this lesson at their daddies' knees, others must bend to it, accept it and finesse it, in order to survive.
Families who like this movie might also enjoy Traffic, Three Kings, or an earlier government corruption thriller, The Parallax View (1974). You might also want to read the film's inspiration, Robert Baer's memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.
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Sexual ContentSome women wear skimpy clothing. |
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ViolencePlot involves CIA assassinations; images include torture; accidental death of young boy, explosions, and suicide bombing. |
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LanguageSome profanity. |
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Social BehaviorInternational espionage and assassination; cheating, lying, and little in the way of " learned." |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoCharacters drink socially and smoke. |
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