Iraq. I’m sick of it. You’re tired of it. In the new espionage thriller Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe are sick and tired of it, and our whole country is fed up with “the moment of silence at the ball games,” as Crowe says in the role of the head of the Middle East branch of the CIA.
Body of Lies by director Ridley Scott pays audiences the compliment of delivering consistently intelligent fare, often about real (or at least real-ish) figures. He dares to get across a palpable sense of Iraq fatigue. Which is another way of saying that Scott practically invites the audience to go see the talking Chihuahua picture instead.
The movie does better in atmosphere than it does in the mechanics of its action scenes, which range from improbable to extremely improbable. DiCaprio, wearing a deeply suspicious chin beard meant to make him look like an Arab, plays Ferris, a spy posted in Iraq on the trail of an inflammatory cleric, Al Saleem, who is promising much mayhem. Barking orders at him from Langley is Crowe’s Hoffman, a chunky, chuckling Southerner in a brush cut who waddles around his kids’ soccer games ordering Ferris into increasingly hairy situations, sometimes without telling Ferris exactly what’s going on.
The effort to make Crowe and DiCaprio equally important figures doesn’t really work; Crowe is effectively a mere voice on the phone and we don’t really even need to lay eyes on his character, who keeps flying in to meet with Ferris for superfluous personal sitdowns.
The movie is determined to set up a somewhat forced contrast by showing Crowe in comically un-dangerous suburban settings as DiCaprio dodges bullets, but surely the experienced desk man and the gutsy, Arabic-speaking field man are both vitally important.
Ferris goes to Jordan to share notes with the head (Mark Strong) of Jordanian intelligence, a dapper Machiavellian who may or may not be trustworthy and, in the hospital after one of many near-fatal attacks, he begins to chat up a quiet Iranian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani, a find) who is so shy she can barely return his gaze. Dating her could be dangerous for them both.
The operations keep hitting dead ends, which gives the movie a start-and-stop rhythm. At the halfway point, Ferris hits on a fascinating scheme: he decides to set up a fake terrorist group, use it to bomb a real American building in Turkey and have the fake terrorists claim credit for the attack — a move he hopes will draw Al-Saleem out to hook up with his newfound brothers in Jihad. What makes the idea even more bizarre is that Ferris is going to create a terrorist identity for a real person who doesn’t even know he’s being manipulated.
Tossing an entirely innocent person into a deadly game also poses a moral quandary, though it’s one that Hoffman doesn’t lose any sleep over. In one of many brilliant lines from the script by William Monhan (who won an Oscar for The Departed), Hoffman asks, “You gotta decide which side of the cross you on? I need nailers, not hangers.” (Monahan has a brilliant take on the fatalism of men in peril — another character, who is about to enter a possible redoubt of jihadists, says, “I am not getting my head cut off on the Internet. If something happens, shoot me.”)
Body of Lies is in the same category of engrossing action thrillers as last year’s Jamie Foxx-Jennifer Garner movie The Kingdom, but the earlier film, unashamedly patriotic, didn’t wring its hands like this one, which begins with an ominous quotation from Auden about how “those to whom evil is done do evil in return” and more or less takes the position that America has undermined its claim to moral superiority by stooping to the other side’s level.
The things that provide the most entertainment in Body of Lies have worked in a lot of other movies: the tech gizmos. As in the Jason Bourne series, experts call shots from thousands of miles away because they can watch anything in the world via satellites (it’s a comfort to know the CIA has figured out how to use Google Earth) or launch helicopter gunships to save Ferris from getting too singed in the hellfire. We’re assured at one point that U.S. forces won’t fail because “we have, uh, ninjas waiting.”
For his part, Hoffman may not need a flak jacket but he has his own ordeals, too: As he tells Ferris: “I have to take the kids to see The Lion King. Again. Never have kids.”
BODY OF LIES
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani
2 stars/ 4
129 minutes/Rated R
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