On Screen

LIONS FOR LAMBS

Starring Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan. Directed by Robert Redford. (14A) 90 min. Opens Nov 9.

The casting of a post-meltdown Tom Cruise as an idealistic Republican politician in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs is brilliant – one photogenic, self-deluding soul portraying another.

Cruise's Senator Jasper Irving is a conservative tyro spearheading a risky new US military strategy in Afghanistan. He invites a well-known TV news reporter (Meryl Streep) to his DC office, hoping she'll sell the public on his bill of goods. On the other coast, a rumpled political science professor (Redford) pleads with a promising but truant student (Andrew Garfield) to rise above his why-bother cynicism by regaling him with tales of previous prize pupils. Elsewhere still, two American soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) lie wounded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. They're the fallen emissaries of the senator's plan and the undergrad achievers described by the professor, a connect-the-dots contrivance that suggests Redford and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan have glommed over the list of recent Oscar nominees.

Maybe that's unfair: Lions for Lambs is nothing if not sincere in its attempts to work through contentious issues, with Cruise's character serving as a variably articulate devil's advocate for the War on Terror crowd. But the script ultimately wrestles itself to a kind of ideological stalemate, and Redford's aesthetics are similarly blocked. Stagy and schematic, it's merely the latest of this fall's topical dramas (with the exception of Brian DePalma's sly, spiky Redacted) to illustrate an unfortunate condition afflicting well-meaning filmmakers: the impotence of being earnest. AN

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