Body of Lies

Directed by Ridley Scott

With Body of Lies, blockbuster auteur Ridley Scott is lost without a roadmap in a genre whose conventions are still too murky for him to break. This disappointment has roots both in Scott’s career as a potentially (rarely) transcendent genre filmmaker, and the underwhelming string of terrorism-themed action films released since 9/11. As recent entries show, the anti-terrorism thriller remains on shaky ground despite its obvious poignancy. From Syriana, The Kingdom, The Traitor, all the way back to Collateral Damage and (arguably) Transformers, no director has succeeded in turning our culture’s CNN bombing footage-addiction into an intelligent action-thriller masterpiece of moral and political intrigue and explosions (except, one could argue, Alfonzo Cuarón with Children of Men).

Scott might have been the perfect man for the job, as his most vital work subverts traditions that have been branded into multiplex-going retinas summer after summer. Blade Runner, Alien and (to a lesser extent) Thelma & Louise began with a comfortable formula (sci-fi, monster, buddy road trip) before turning our expectations against us. Those films have informed every subsequent entry in their given genres, something Body of Lies can’t do for the overplayed, under-thought terrorism thriller.

Here, the Michael Jordan of counter-terrorism agents (Leo DiCaprio’s Roger Ferris) works the arms trade in the Middle-East, taking (or rejecting) cues from Bluetoothed CIA suit Ed Hoffman in D.C. (Russell Crowe, putting on a southern accent and looking his most slovenly and suburban since The Insider). Based on a novel by Washington Post writer David Ignatius and adapted by Departed screenwriter William Monahan, Body of Lies is rife with familiar plot points and untapped intrigue.

The action is centered on Ferris running into and out of enemy bases and tense alliances, making for encounters that recall Team America: World Police more often than Scott probably intended. Greater screen time for slimy Ed might have set Body of Lies apart from preceding terrorism blockbusters. Telling Ferris to kill one compromised informant after another while tucking his kids into bed and dropping them off at school, Ed dramatizes (hyperbolically, sure) the moral detachment of affecting a war on another continent without seeing its consequences. Sadly, how Ed reconciles child-rearing and war-mongering remains unaddressed.

How do we deal with the traumas and responsibilities of destruction elsewhere in the world when they’re so easy to tune out? Sounds heavy man, let’s watch the sweet Muslim girl (Golshifteh Farahani, stuck with the film’s token female role) fall for Leo and helicopter-SUV shootouts instead. Though he skews screen time towards DiCaprio’s familiar scowl while Crowe works much harder on the sidelines, some of Body of Lies’ set pieces remind us why Scott lives in the Pantheon of blockbuster directors.

It’s not quite Spike Lee reinventing the heist film with Inside Man, but Scott sure puts the Paul Greengrasses and Christopher Nolans to shame. He comfortably foregoes such schlocks’ disorienting shaky cams and nauseating editing, favoring gliding movements, patient establishing shots, expertly-paced action sequences and exquisite compositions. Ever the visual artists, Scott and favorite cinematographer Alexander Witt seem to overcompensate visually for Body of Lies’ mishandled script.

Not surprising, because when Scott can’t break from traditions he seems to settle on making them really good-looking. Classic Hollywood epic Gladiator is a perfect example of this habit, but Black Hawk Down and American Gangster fit the pattern too. Body of Lies seems destined to be the latest on that list. It’s stylishly average in a budding terrorism-thriller genre whose traditions aren’t sufficiently strong to be broken by the kind of artistic force Ridley Scott once wielded.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.