Lions For Lambs
by Spencer Warren
Issue 97 - December 12, 2007

What would you expect of a film directed by Robert Redford which stars himself, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep? Lions for Lambs is one of a number of left-wing movies highly critical of the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have premiered in recent months, joining In the Valley of Elah and the now infamous Redacted, which features U.S. troops raping and murdering an Iraqi girl and then slaughtering her family. Each has – pardon the metaphor – bombed at the box office, although whether the public’s repudiation will change the attitudes of the hate-America Hollywood left-wingers responsible for the films, or affect their careers, is doubtful. They have a lot of cachet in Hollywood.

Lions for Lambs is what a Bill Moyers movie would be if he ever made one. Or, put another way, Redford should have booked himself on the Moyers program for a thirty minute interview instead. There he could have made his points more cogently, at much less expense (the taxpayers would have picked up part of the bill for Moyers’s PBS program), and perhaps to more people than will see his film, which also is proving a box office flop. In the movie – it really can hardly be called a motion picture – Redford and the screenwriter set up three parallel scenes between which they intercut for virtually the entire film. Two of the scenes are all talk. In the first, Miss Streep plays a veteran TV journalist, Janine Roth, interviewing in his office the young hot-shot Republican Senator Jasper Irving, played by Tom Cruise. Only in movies do senators have such names. Also only in ludicrous movies like these is a Harvard graduate also a West Point man.

In the film’s first blatant contrivance, the Senator, evidently with official sanction, is giving Janine an exclusive on the great new forward base strategy our forces are executing in Afghanistan even as he speaks. Of course, such a disclosure would come from the executive branch, not the Congress. This gives Redford and his screenwriter the opportunity to frame a very long debate between the hawk Senator and the skeptical journalist. She felt snookered on the Iraq war in 2003 (or maybe she thinks she was lied to about Afghanistan and 9-11 as well – Redford makes this vague, perhaps deliberately) but now is asking the questions she regrets not asking before. They talk and talk, back and forth, on and on.

The second scene takes us to Afghanistan, where a helicopter is transporting U.S. special forces to the first such special base. This so-called “strategy” is the second contrivance; it makes no sense and is designed to depict two of the soldiers, a Hispanic and a Black, getting the shaft by the Senator and all the civilian higher-ups: the helicopter is shot down and they are the sole survivors, trapped in a snow-filled mountain-pass, surrounded by Taliban fighters. They are the “lions” of the title, who pay with their young lives for the hubris of the white establishment personified by Senator Irving, who, we learn, served in the military only in intelligence, not in a combat unit. The Senator represents the “lambs” of the title.

Afghanistan is the only sequence in the film that has any movement. In the third scene, Redford is a political science professor sitting in his office debating a wise-guy student (are students today really so very full of themselves and disrespectful toward their teachers?) about the meaning of life and the special responsibility of the young educated elite in our morally corrupted country. Redford finally lets us out of his tiny office in a flashback, where we learn two of his other students were the Hispanic and the Black; they were good students who had risen from their oppressed backgrounds and, rejecting Professor Redford’s wise guidance, decided to join the Army rather than go to graduate school and embark directly on careers of making a “difference.”

The rationale the screenwriter places in the mouths of these two young men is especially convoluted. The film presents them in the most pathetic cliché terms as victims, but ironically the two actually are made victims of the filmmakers’ liberal identity, grievance politics. I am not using their character names because their role is only as the Hispanic and the Black – the oppressed, suckered minorities in a didactic, heavy-handed lecture pretending to be a motion picture. Also, their place in this film suggests Redford and his screenwriter, Matthew Michael Carnahan, are confusing the current war with the Vietnam War, where drafted poor minorities did comprise a relatively high percentage of the troops; judging from what I see on television, the volunteer troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have a much lower minority representation. But why let facts get in the way of their liberal race victim narrative? And cannot our non-minority troops suffer the consequences of official ineptitude as well?

The two young victims are shot to death in the freezing mountain-pass before the rescue helicopter arrives. Here director Redford has a moving, distant shot of the two bodies lying in the snow, but, as we usually see in films today, he can’t resist a couple of closer shots in a misguided desire to drill his point into the viewer’s head. A director who understands his craft, like John Ford and King Vidor (see my review at http://acuf.org/issues/issue96/071117med.asp) would allow his more distant, understated, poetic image to inspire the viewer’s imagination, which can comprehend the director’s point on the deepest emotional level. Like most directors today, Redford thus shows a lack of trust or disrespect for the audience, or perhaps, like the screenwriter, he doesn’t understand the art of filmmaking, despite more than forty years in the business.

Near the end, Redford permits Janine the journalist to escape the Senator’s office so she can hurry to her network TV producer. This allows Redford to film a scene where the producer insists on presenting the story straight, rejecting her wishes to present it skeptically – thus making the media establishment complicit in the deaths of the Hispanic and Black victims. Redford also finally allows his wise-guy student to escape his professorial inquisition, so he can come out and tell us he has learned that smart kids like him have to become involved in public affairs in order to prevent there being more victims of the white establishment.

This is Redford’s idea of a motion picture.

The film does raise some legitimate issues, but they are not presented intelligently, much less in the dramatic form a motion picture requires. Why does the film choose the war in Afghanistan, the origins and conduct of which are not open to the serious questions posed by the Iraq war? The two soldiers who are killed are doing a necessary job in Afghanistan, the place where bin Laden planned 9-11. Perhaps, as noted above, the film is implying the government lied about 9-11 as well as Iraq. But assuming that the film just intends Afghanistan to stand in for Iraq, we must note that many of our troops have apparently died or been wounded in Iraq due to the incompetent “go light” strategy evidently forced on the military by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, the latter a typical “policy wonk” without military experience. These civilians overturned years of pre-war planning that called for a much larger invading force. President Bush retained Rumsfeld, in my opinion one of the two worst defense secretaries in history (with Robert McNamara), for far too long, to the point where, unless General Petraeus’s surge is allowed by domestic politics all the time it needs to succeed fully, the war may be lost. According to reports, Rumsfeld (and thus Bush) also bear responsibility for inadequate protective equipment, such as the Humvees that lacked armor protection against the enemy’s road mines and explosive devices. Further, President Bush to this day has failed to ask the American people to share in the sacrifices of our troops, who have had to endure repeated tours of duty because he inexplicably has failed to expand the size of the Army to shoulder the many extra tasks he has placed in its shoulders.

A good film that did effectively dramatize the plight of soldiers suffering due to incompetence at the top is the 1957 Kirk Douglas World War I drama, directed by Stanley Kubrick, Paths of Glory. The issues presented today are more complex, but in any event Redford and company do not have the talent to pull off an effective motion picture dramatizing such issues. Their film is completely misconceived and is simply a product of their left-wing political agenda.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline.com's media critic.