CinePhillyist Reviews... Body of Lies

In the movie Lakeview Terrace, released two weeks ago, Samuel L. Jackson is told by a neighbor that at least housing prices should continue to rise. That line of dialogue, innocuous enough when written, instantly places the movie as a relic of the hazily-remembered golden days of last summer, when subprime mortgages and those who securitized them saw no end in sight. Body of Lies is equally ill-served by the time-lag involved in movie production.

In a moment in history where the dominant narrative tells us that the surge is working and people use the terms “carnage,” “collapse,” and “crisis” to describe Bear Stearns rather than Baghdad, Body of Lies is about Iraq and the war on terror. To make matters worse, the movie comes with an armful of earnest policy prescriptions like Hollywood’s answer to the Iraq Study Group, eschewing the potential timelessness of great cinema in exchange for the incessant topicality of latter-day Law & Order. Like the show, Body of Lies is ripped from the headlines. Last year’s headlines.

That commitment to immediacy is apparent the second you see Leonardo DiCaprio, who looks scruffier here than he ever did playing the infamously razor-averse Howard Hughes. Alas, the beard, and the scars that continually criss-cross DiCaprio's face, are doing most of the work. They signify his willingness to delve into a character rather than forming a character. Russell Crowe, as DiCaprio’s CIA handler in Langley, has a similar problem. Crowe’s introduced in a wonderful scene where he undertakes a tricky negotiation with a potential double agent while simultaneously getting his children ready in the morning; it’s disappointing, then, when the movie makes clear that there’s nothing to the character aside from an amiable bloodlessness. Only Mark Strong, as the imperious Jordanian spymaster Hani Salaam, is able to give his character any inner life.

Screenwriter William Monahan brilliantly adapted the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs into The Departed, marrying his facility with dialogue and a sense of verisimilitude to the strong structure of the original. The novel, by all appearances, was not nearly as helpful. Body of Lies is a sloppy piece of work that spends well over an hour displaying Monahan’s facility with national security jargon before deciding that perhaps a story might be a good thing to have. That’s only a mixed blessing, however, as whatever sense of verisimilitude the movie has established is undercut by a plot that requires our allegedly experienced CIA hand to act as if he thought Muslim was a kind of fabric.

Ridley Scott is not much help in this regard either; he ends up giving the proceedings a schizophrenic feel. Scott has always over-directed his material, so that even a low-key con man movie like Matchstick Men is coated in an impersonal sheen for no conceivable reason. That temptation is in constant struggle with his desire to impart a sense of shaky-cam you-are-there immediacy, the result being something like the most hardcore Lexus commercial you’ve ever seen. The sight of Leonardo DiCaprio being brutally tortured is not as jarring as the cut immediately following to what appears to be the desert vistas of an early ‘00s Sting video. Like everything else about this movie, he’s trying too hard.

Image Credit: Warner Brothers Pictures