Body of Lies (2008) film wallpapers :
Body of Lies (2008) Film Rating and Review :
Rating :
Acting – 6/10
Direction – 4/10
Screenplay – 4/10
Music – 5/10
Technique – 6/10
Review :
Purposeless intensity
Ridley Scott’s new movie, Body of Lies, raises a potentially disturbing question. If terrorism has become boring, does that mean the terrorists have won? Or, conversely, is the grinding tedium of this film good news for our side, evidence of the awesome might of Western popular culture, which can turn even the most intransigent and bloodthirsty real-world villains into fodder for busy, contrived and lifeless action thrillers?
The second answer seems more plausible, but there are other puzzles in Body of Lies that are not so easily solved and that may distract from sober contemplation of geopolitical pseudorealities. What exactly is going on with Leonardo DiCaprio’s accent, or Russell Crowe’s body mass index? DiCaprio, playing a high-strung C.I.A. operative named Roger Ferris, once again shows his commitment to full employment for dialect coaches, following the mock-Afrikaans of Blood Diamond and the South Boston braying of The Departed with some good-old-boy inflections that are helpfully identified by Crowe’s character as originating in North Carolina.
Crowe, meanwhile, plays Ferris’s supervisor, Ed Hoffman, who lives somewhere around Washington and has no specified regional background to explain his odd little drawl. At times Crowe spits out his words with an emphatic twanginess that suggests, if not George W. Bush himself, then perhaps Jon Stewart impersonating Bush. It’s possible that this resemblance is meant to imply a parallel between the president and Hoffman, who is immune to self-doubt and allergic to second thoughts about the righteousness of his actions.
And also, it appears, to exercise (unlike the president). With an unusual display of impish delight, Crowe throws himself into the physicality of his character, a schlubby, tubby suburban dad whose near-parodic commitment to domestic routine contrasts amusingly with his professional fanaticism. Using a hands-free cellphone, Hoffman orchestrates elaborate schemes and double-crosses while going about his daily paterfamilias business: loading his kids into the minivan, helping his young son in the bathroom and tearing open a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers on the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game.
On the phone, and in his occasional surprise visits to Ferris in the field, Hoffman is fighting a war whose terms he lays out in a few set-piece speeches. The gist is that no one is innocent and that the ends justify the means. Deceit, torture, the sacrifice of non-American lives — all is permissible in the fight against a shadowy superjihadist named Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul), head of a network carrying out suicide attacks around Europe. The contradictions and unintended consequences of Hoffman’s tactics are borne by Ferris, who finds his credibility undermined, his friends and colleagues at risk and his life in danger.
All of which would be fine if Body of Lies — with a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed) and based on a novel by David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post — were clearer about its themes or its plot. As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity. Place names flash onto the screen — Amman! Amsterdam! Langley! — and shiny black S.U.V.’s and Mercedes sedans screech through teeming streets. From time to time an orange fireball erupts, and everything shows up on the satellite surveillance screens back at headquarters.
In Jordan, Ferris flirts with Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), an Iranian refugee who works as a nurse and who has even less of an organic relation to the narrative than poor Vera Farmiga did in The Departed. The dramatic — I daresay the erotic — centre of Body of Lies is an all-male triangle involving Ferris, Hoffman and Hani (Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian intelligence. Strong, also seen in the similar and superior Syriana, is a marvel of exotic suavity and cool insinuation. Hani calls Ferris “my dear” and may be more sincere in his affection than the ideologically driven Hoffman, who refers Ferris as “buddy.”
If the psychological tensions linking these three were allowed time and space to develop, Body of Lies might have been a more surprising and interesting specimen of its genre. Instead, it throws out a few gestures toward topicality — an opening quote from the W. H. Auden poem that flew around the Internet just after 9/11; glances toward Gitmo and the Green Zone; an awkward dinner-table spat about American foreign policy — without saying much of anything. Scott’s professionalism is, as ever, present in every frame, but it seems singularly untethered from anything like zeal, conviction or even curiosity.
Acting – 6/10
Direction – 4/10
Screenplay – 4/10
Music – 5/10
Technique – 6/10
Review :
Purposeless intensity
Ridley Scott’s new movie, Body of Lies, raises a potentially disturbing question. If terrorism has become boring, does that mean the terrorists have won? Or, conversely, is the grinding tedium of this film good news for our side, evidence of the awesome might of Western popular culture, which can turn even the most intransigent and bloodthirsty real-world villains into fodder for busy, contrived and lifeless action thrillers?
The second answer seems more plausible, but there are other puzzles in Body of Lies that are not so easily solved and that may distract from sober contemplation of geopolitical pseudorealities. What exactly is going on with Leonardo DiCaprio’s accent, or Russell Crowe’s body mass index? DiCaprio, playing a high-strung C.I.A. operative named Roger Ferris, once again shows his commitment to full employment for dialect coaches, following the mock-Afrikaans of Blood Diamond and the South Boston braying of The Departed with some good-old-boy inflections that are helpfully identified by Crowe’s character as originating in North Carolina.
Crowe, meanwhile, plays Ferris’s supervisor, Ed Hoffman, who lives somewhere around Washington and has no specified regional background to explain his odd little drawl. At times Crowe spits out his words with an emphatic twanginess that suggests, if not George W. Bush himself, then perhaps Jon Stewart impersonating Bush. It’s possible that this resemblance is meant to imply a parallel between the president and Hoffman, who is immune to self-doubt and allergic to second thoughts about the righteousness of his actions.
And also, it appears, to exercise (unlike the president). With an unusual display of impish delight, Crowe throws himself into the physicality of his character, a schlubby, tubby suburban dad whose near-parodic commitment to domestic routine contrasts amusingly with his professional fanaticism. Using a hands-free cellphone, Hoffman orchestrates elaborate schemes and double-crosses while going about his daily paterfamilias business: loading his kids into the minivan, helping his young son in the bathroom and tearing open a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers on the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game.
On the phone, and in his occasional surprise visits to Ferris in the field, Hoffman is fighting a war whose terms he lays out in a few set-piece speeches. The gist is that no one is innocent and that the ends justify the means. Deceit, torture, the sacrifice of non-American lives — all is permissible in the fight against a shadowy superjihadist named Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul), head of a network carrying out suicide attacks around Europe. The contradictions and unintended consequences of Hoffman’s tactics are borne by Ferris, who finds his credibility undermined, his friends and colleagues at risk and his life in danger.
All of which would be fine if Body of Lies — with a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed) and based on a novel by David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post — were clearer about its themes or its plot. As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity. Place names flash onto the screen — Amman! Amsterdam! Langley! — and shiny black S.U.V.’s and Mercedes sedans screech through teeming streets. From time to time an orange fireball erupts, and everything shows up on the satellite surveillance screens back at headquarters.
In Jordan, Ferris flirts with Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), an Iranian refugee who works as a nurse and who has even less of an organic relation to the narrative than poor Vera Farmiga did in The Departed. The dramatic — I daresay the erotic — centre of Body of Lies is an all-male triangle involving Ferris, Hoffman and Hani (Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian intelligence. Strong, also seen in the similar and superior Syriana, is a marvel of exotic suavity and cool insinuation. Hani calls Ferris “my dear” and may be more sincere in his affection than the ideologically driven Hoffman, who refers Ferris as “buddy.”
If the psychological tensions linking these three were allowed time and space to develop, Body of Lies might have been a more surprising and interesting specimen of its genre. Instead, it throws out a few gestures toward topicality — an opening quote from the W. H. Auden poem that flew around the Internet just after 9/11; glances toward Gitmo and the Green Zone; an awkward dinner-table spat about American foreign policy — without saying much of anything. Scott’s professionalism is, as ever, present in every frame, but it seems singularly untethered from anything like zeal, conviction or even curiosity.
2 comments:
Ridley Scott is dependably good; apparently he likes working with Russel Crowe and Leo DiCaprio
I was not impressed with this movie at all. I thought the acting was well done, although I did find myself wondering about the validity of Russell Crowe's accent as well...overall, I found the film to be disorganized and relatively uneventful (until the end, really). An 'A' for effort, but in the end, a disappointment.
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