Blogical Conclusion

ARABIAN KNIGHTS

A group of Americans kicks some serious terrorist butt in an engaging Middle Eastern adventure. Plus an all-too-rare all-message movie, and a harebrained heist flick.

FEB 1, 2007 - IT’S A FAIRLY COMMON ASSESSMENT that mainstream Hollywood films these days are made on the assembly line, but some of them could just as easily have been created in the kitchen: extract mismatched-cops-and-eventual-buddies essence of In the Heat of the Night, toss in the noble Westerner’s empathy for the exotically savage East from Lawrence of Arabia, overheat for two hours and… voilà! The Kingdom is ready for your consumption. The realm of the title refers to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and over the opening credits we get a crash course on how this country of black gold has ended up a battleground for the pro-US monarchy and the extremist Wahabi militants. It’s all very sincere and sombre, until you realise that director Peter Berg isn’t out to deconstruct the affairs of the Middle East so much as use these tensions as crackling backdrop for his all-American procedural-cum-action-adventure, the way filmmakers of another era found the Cold War a bottomless mine of plotting gold.

You know what kind of movie you’re watching when terrorists blow up a bunch of American expatriates as they’re – wait for this – playing baseball. The Kingdom may have the decency to refrain from having Norman Rockwell by the bleachers, sketching this idyll on his easel while pausing for bites of homemade apple pie, but it’s a rah-rah Uncle Sam adventure all right. Four FBI agents – rather, four carefully-chosen types that represent uncomfortable otherness to the Saudis: the Black Leader (Jamie Foxx), the Profanity-spewing White Man (a wonderfully dry Chris Cooper), the Jew (Jason Bateman) and the Ballbusting Career Woman (Jennifer Garner) – fly in to investigate the crime, and it’s only a matter of time before the expected narrative targets are hit: from initial mistrust and wary circling around their Middle Eastern colleagues to inevitable first-name-basis bonding over pop-culture patter about The Hulk and The Six Million Dollar Man to bang-up climactic action sequence where our heroes discover, among other things, that nothing stops a bad guy in his tracks quite like a knife-stab in his privates.

It’s all utterly predictable. It’s also utterly entertaining, and the only times The Kingdom falters is when Berg attempts to temper the adrenaline with affect. At one point, he portrays the Americans as jerks, making snarky cracks about the number of virgins waiting in heaven for Islamic martyrs, and then he cuts to their Saudi-soldier colleague (Ashraf Barhom, as the film’s most interesting character and giving its most layered performance) enjoying a quiet evening with his family. (Yes, yes, we get it: They Are People Too.) I could have also lived without the endless-cycle-of-violence message, but more unsettling are the real-life parallels, as when Foxx gets news of the terrorist attack (orchestrated by an “Osama wannabe”) while at his son’s nursery school. It’s not clear what Berg wants to accomplish by reminding us that Bush was reading out stories to schoolkids while the real Osama wreaked havoc on American soil. Then again, maybe he’s just stretching his wish-fulfillment fantasy to the limit, pretending that at least on film, a bunch of Americans did what they came to do in a Middle Eastern country and got out in a blaze of glory.

AT THE OPPOSITE END OF THE AUDIENCE-PLEASING SPECTRUM from The Kingdom lies Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs. Where the former film merely attempts to sneak in a message or two into what is primarily a well-crafted entertainment, this one doesn’t even bother to disguise itself as entertainment. We’ve heard about the medium being the message, but we see it here in action; the movie – all ninety purposeful minutes of it – is the message. This honesty, this transparency of purpose, this refusal to trick you into buying what it’s selling is the film’s strength. It’s simply a series of sometimes-eloquent-sometimes-clunky topical discussions, with Redford not setting the stage for his actors so much as erecting pulpits for their rhetorical grandstanding. Tom Cruise sinks those inhumanly white teeth into his best part since Magnolia, playing a smarmy senator who doesn’t flinch from mining his conversations with word-bombs like “metastasised” and “quintessential,” and who undergoes – as his makeover-guru character in Magnolia did – one long, draining interrogation by a television reporter (Meryl Streep, downplaying her usual assortment of tics to portray an impressive mix of steel and self-doubt).

This narrative arc is intercut with that of a college professor (Redford) attempting to dissuade a cynical student (Andrew Garfield) from throwing his life away after disillusionment with the institutions of his country. And far, far away, a couple of soldiers (Derek Luke and Michael Peña) lie injured in the snow-strewn mountains of Afghanistan, trying to ward off their Taliban counterparts until rescue arrives. Each of these arcs links to the next – Luke and Peña once studied under the professor, and they’re now part of the implementation of the senator’s ambitious plan to weed out evil and win the war (along with, what else, the hearts and minds of the people) – and put together, these talky vignettes are meant to add up to a grand indictment of American foreign policy, the apathy of the citizenry, the sad, present-day fact that “civilisations do not sustain themselves through non-violence,” the culpability of the media, why Iraq isn’t like Vietnam, and about a few hundred other things I missed. There’s nothing in here you don’t already know, but Redford lays out his concerns and contentions without wrapping them up in neat bows of remedial measures, and his conviction sweeps you along. There were times I wished he’d gone easy on the talking heads and bothered to actually stage his scenes, but that would have made a movie movie out of something that simply wants to be a message movie.

THERE’S SURELY A COLLECTION BOX BEING PASSED AROUND in some corner of the Western hemisphere, seeking contributions for the autumnal upkeep of Hollywood’s once-adored – and if there isn’t, Mad Money makes a solid case for its necessity. If that’s what it takes to keep the likes of Diane Keaton away from such eye-rollingly nonsensical trifles, then so be it. Money, really, is the only possible explanation for Keaton opting to play Bridget, an upper-middle-class matron who finds she has to get a job because her husband is downsized and they are in debt to the tune of $300,000. Having no skills to speak of, at least those that matter in the employment market – when asked if she knows any software, she crinkles her eyes and volunteers, “I’m good with Google;” who’d hire her? – Bridget ends up a cleaning lady at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. On the job, she notices piles of old currency notes being shredded to make way for shiny new bills, and she thinks up the perfect crime: this worn-out money doesn’t even exist anymore, so who’d care if she stole some!

What follows is Topkapi for the Terms of Endearment crowd – except that there’s no thrill in the crime and no suspense in the punishment. This is an oddly rhythmless picture whose only interest in the robbery is that it’s committed by three popular stars. Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes play Nina and Jackie, Bridget’s cohorts, and they try vainly to inject some humanity into the story – Nina is a single mom; Jackie has dreams of globetrotting – but Latifah ends up the target of an unfunny running joke about how long it’s been since she last had sex, and Holmes is basically asked to bounce around with earphones. (“Somebody is definitely peeing in her cup,” Nina snorts, seeing Jackie convulsing to her music.) There’s no reason to root for these characters because there’s no explanation for why they stupidly (and greedily) continue stealing even after they know they have enough, and worse, they’re on the verge of getting caught. The film reasons that the Establishment deserves to get screwed, but it may just be that her financial troubles have unhinged Bridget – a fact driven home by Keaton’s wild mugging. Seriously, where’s that collection box?

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