The United States is addicted to oil. That's not news now and it wasn't news back in 2005, when Oscar winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan's Syriana was released. The film, featuring an all-star ensemble cast that the screen has rarely seen since, centers on how we keep that addiction going. Like the real-life global web of intrigue and deception that it necessitates, Syriana is a purposefully confounding movie that requires multiple viewings to make sense of.
Gaghan won his Oscar for writing the screenplay to Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), so it's easy to write off Syriana as the oil version of Traffic, which centered on the equally troubling drug trade. But Syriana is actually on a much bigger scale, taking a look at the global scam by the U.S. to keep undemocratic governments in power in the Middle East to keep the oil trade to itself.
The catalyst for the film is the merger of oil giant Connex and Killen, a much smaller company that mysteriously got drilling rights in Kazakhstan. Connex needs to make the merger happen because it is about to lose a major foothold in the Middle East as Prince Nassir (Alexander Siddig) gave drilling rights in his country to a Chinese company instead. But the U.S. government has convinced his father to name his lazy son as the successor so the rights will go to an American company.
That's the foundation, which is about the least confusing part of the movie. Even though the government is behind this chess match, the Department of Justice is convinced that Killen pulled some illegal deal behind-the-scenes, so they get lawyer Bennet Holliday (Jeffrey Wright) to dig up some dirt. Of course, there's a conflict of interest there, because Holliday's firm is also the one working for Connex to make sure the government will approve the deal.
Puzzled yet? There's more, because the CIA also wants Nassir dead. But CIA agent Bob Barnes (George Clooney) was investigating a possible assassination plot against Nassir. Now that Bob thinks something's up, he is being investigated and shut out of the agency.
Energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is also a key player, since his firm is advising Nassir. He's basically the deliverer of words of wisdom for Nassir, even though he's only pointing out the obvious. Bryan is more or less the audience's guide through Nassir's storyline.
Finally, there's Pakistani migrant worker Wasim (Mazhar Munir), who has just lost his job and meets a fundamentalist. Their relationship has a major impact on everyone in the film, but that, of course, isn't revealed towards the end.
I really hate spending too much space on a film's plot, but Syriana is such a multilayer film with so much crammed into two hours it boggles the mind. Even after all that, I've only scratched the surface of everything that's going on. Gaghan may have taken on too much if he wasn't so good at actually making this all fit together somehow. After writing Traffic, he certainly had to know how to put pieces of his own puzzle together. In Syriana, he takes a good 45 minutes before the audience starts to learn what these characters have to do with each other.
With so much going on, it's surprising that actors were given any chance to stand out. Of course, when you're George Clooney and one of the executive producers on the project, you probably make sure you get a few scenes. And Clooney relishes them. You can just see an actor taking full advantage of playing against type as a veteran CIA agent far past his prime. While it's not really a true supporting part (he is really the lead in his story, after all), he actually deserved the Oscar. At least he kept Crash from winning any more undue awards.
Wright is also really good in several scenes, as he butts heads with the oil tycoons. At some points, Damon seems like the weak link in the film, but he impresses in his scenes with Alexander Siddig. Other members of this star-studded cast include William Hurt (who we see too little of), Amanda Peet, the always amazing Christopher Plummer, Tim Blake Nelson and Chris Cooper.
But the real star, as Clooney says in one of the bonus features on the DVD, is Gaghan's script. This can be a detriment though, since it does highlight some of the flaws here. Syriana doesn't really take sides. We learn about what it takes the U.S. to remain the oil power in the world while taking oil from other countries. So Gaghan is more interested in just showing us how it works than really taking a position against the system. Of course, this could be the point – let your audience decide if this is a good system or not.
There's also the negative aspects of doing a film like Traffic, where you have all these disconnected pieces. Syriana doesn't have a character that the audience can really latch on to as their eyes and ears to these shady deals. Damon, Wright and Clooney could have their own movies and Gaghan still should have been able to get his point across. Gaghan isn't that type of filmmaker though. Clearly, he never intended to make a straight-forward thriller about a CIA cover-up (Clooney's story) or corruption (Wright). In the 1970s, these would be two different movies. For Gaghan, it's one movie with a central idea (oil is a dirty business) and no central character.
Syriana isn't a bad movie at all, just a very good frustrating one. Its web of plots and characters can be confusing in the first viewing, but requires another take. The very fact that it exists at all is surprising, but if Clooney and co-executive producer Soderbergh have something they want audiences to see, they make sure it happens. This isn't the ultimate movie on oil corruption, but Syriana is as close as we'll get to a Boom Town for the 21st Century.
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