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Saturday, 26 November 2005 11:54

SYRIANA (Warner Bros., R) 

It wasn’t until I made my weekly trip to the gas station that I began to fully appreciate Syriana. As I stood and watched the price of the fill-up pass the $20 mark, I began to mull over the questions spawned by the film. Why was I paying absurdly high amounts of money for gasoline while at the same time oil companies were reporting huge profits? What had people gone through to get me the ten gallons of gas I was putting in my tank? Were people tortured for it? Had anyone died or been killed? Had the CIA played a vital part in providing fuel for my car?

These are the questions asked in Syriana, the new film written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for writing Traffic. The film revolves around the lives of four people who, whether they know it or not, are key players in the battle for petroleum. Robert Barnes (George Clooney) is a career CIA officer who has unquestionably devoted his life to fighting terrorism in the Middle East, but begins to question how he is now being used by the government. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is a family man and oil broker who, after the death of his son, throws himself into trying to help a Gulf prince (Alexander Siddig) who wants his country to play a bigger role in the supplying oil to the world. Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is a lawyer involved in the merger of two giant oil companies. Wasim (Mazhar Munir) is a Pakistani teenager unable to find work who is befriended by an Islamic instructor with ulterior motives. Few of these characters ever directly interact with one another, but the events of their lives are all interrelated.

Syriana plays out almost identically like Traffic (there were times I was convinced Steven Soderbergh must have been hiding behind Gaghan giving him pointers), only now instead of cocaine, oil is the drug nobody can seem to get enough of. At one point in the film, the quest for oil is described as “a fight to the death,” and between the graphic torture scenes, smart bomb attacks, and suicide missions, Syriana depicts it as nothing short of that.

Gaghan’s last film as director, Abandon, bombed, and so with Syriana he’s essentially going back to a proven formula that still works, and his choice to focus on as hot a topic as the oil industry was also a good one. The film has no clear-cut good guys or bad guys, nor does anyone win definitively in the end. Gaghan wisely lets the individual lives of the characters do the story telling, which frees the audience to draw its own conclusions about the film’s message.

If anything, the worst part of Syriana is it will make your next trip to the gas station far more conflicting than it used to be.