Syriana: The Underbelly of the Oil Business

Syriana: The Underbelly of the Oil Business
by Dileep Rao

In Stephen Gaghan’s newest film Syriana, the screenwriter of Traffic breaks free of filtration through a director and puts the camera under his own command. This has two palpable effects: the structure of the resultant film is even more complex and layered, and the intellectual RAM necessary to manage the larger palette of ideas is much greater.

Neither of these facts say anything about the film’s quality, but if you like your films spoon-fed to you—preferring the applesauce of our modern cinema to the apples off the tree in the orchard experience of truly intellectual filmmaking—then this isn’t for you. Its politics might be (this is the film, as of this writing that everyone wants to say they loved at cocktail parties though few, if any, want to recount its plot), but the film demands attention and real focus. The payoff, though, is terrific.

The film revolves around oil and its many facets, from exploration, drilling, business, and consumption to the fluid out-of-sight economy of convenience in which the many players in this business revolve. One storyline involves a clandestine, ultimately expendable, CIA officer whose areas of expertise are valued only as far as he is not a political liability. The officer, played by a blimped up George Clooney, is awash in his own mission to rectify the turpitude of his actions with a sudden compass of what he thinks is right. This accelerates his disposability to the powers that be, those scary and remote types that are always plotting behind closed doors and glass walls.

In this case, though, we see just how terrifyingly remote they can be: executing actions and people without having to countenance either. Gaghan’s point expands over the other plots, which is how we find ourselves at the point of a spear; we are acting so ruthlessly and so lopsidedly by remote proxy that we wake up on 9/11 and wonder ‘why do they hate us?’ The answer is horrifically complex and lethally reduced—we made them hate us by what is done in our thirst for petroleum.

The other plots are equally deep and engaging: a large oil company buys another to secure contracts to ever-dwindling reservoirs of the black gold, but its politics are fraying as the deal is scrutinized. To unclog the deal (and the spigots of hydrocarbons and profit), the herd of lambs are thinned, the justice department gets a win and the whole awful business goes on. Jeffrey Wright is terrific as the moral lawyer sifting through thousands of lies and documents to uncover a minor victory and watches as the crooked business fetes itself.

Matt Damon plays a well-heeled energy analyst living in Geneva whose life is suddenly drawn into the inner circle of an Emir’s succession struggle. He becomes a believer, a catalyst for a young prince who hopes to make his country something more than an energy pimp. He finds out very quickly his ideas and will are entirely soluable in the politics and needs of the United States. Amanda Peet plays his wife entirely too transparently.

There is also another subplot, one that brings the whole film to a head. It involves two itinerant oil workers, father and son, and the son’s struggle with the seduction of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism. This film shows us up close the endemic dangers of disenfranchised youth and our role in the lives of these young men.

Gaghan has made one other film, the tepid and loosely assembled Abandon, whose only historical assignation will be that it featured Katie Holmes breasts on display before she thought of them as the appendages of thetan fastening. This film is Gaghan’s return to his type of subject matter: large canvases of interconnected ideas that flow like tributaries toward a raging river that flows invisibly under our deliberate ignorance. Whereas Traffic examined that intimate stranger in our midst, the drug trade, it was adapted from a mini-series and delivered newer, more taut and more damningly by Gaghan’s gift for structure.

In Syriana, Gaghan eschews the narrative formula of exposition, action, exposition, action ad nauseum. Instead he gives us just enough exposition and cuts across many different story lines like amino acid racemization, leaping across sections to find the codes that make this world tick. The terror Gaghan composes is cold and calculated and functions with a ruthlessness that hums out of our purview and with extreme unction. Likewise, the implications for our politics are immense; were the somnambulism of the topic to evaporate, we might find ourselves with blood in our gas tanks, and some of it might be our own. Our souls are somewhere on an Emir’s shelf, gathering dust in the gloom.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.