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© 2008 Warner Bros
BODY OF LIES
Movies:
Movie Review: 'BODY OF LIES'
Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe play a couple of C.I.A. agents in a depressingly plausible thriller about trying to find the bad guys
Grade: B+Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Ali Suliman, Simon McBurney
Writer(s): William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius
Director: Ridley Scott
Release Date: Oct. 10th, 2008
Rating: R
Distributor: Warner Bros.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN, Contributing Writer
Published 10/10/2008
In a weird way, BODY OF LIES is sort of the flip side of the recent TRAITOR. Instead of trying to show the humanity of people on all sides of the terrorism issue, BODY gives us a world where manipulation and duplicity know no bounds in anybody’s government.
Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a smart, capable agent who spends a lot of his time lying to people in Middle Eastern battlegrounds. Sometimes, Ferris makes assurances that get information for him and get the informant killed just for talking to him, something Ferris regrets but doesn’t try hard to prevent. However, Ferris is a model of rectitude compared to his boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a smart but uncouth fellow with no respect whatever for non-Americans. (What Hoffman thinks of his fellow nationals is a matter of conjecture, as we don’t see many of them seriously get in his way.) Hoffman and Ferris are trying to track down an elusive master terrorist known as Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul), who may or may not have contact with a safe house in Jordan. Put in charge of the Agency’s Jordan field office, Ferris’ knowledge and good manners serve him well with Hani (Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian intelligence. However, when Hoffman bigfoots his way through an operation, he not only botches the quest but he undermines Ferris’ attempts in a big way. Then Ferris comes up with a really clever plan to entrap Al-Saleem that, among other things, entails entangling a total innocent (Ali Suliman).
Director Ridley Scott is a master of directing action, and there’s plenty of it here, with harrowing explosions, shootouts and even scary foot chases occurring with frequency. He and screenwriter William Monahan, in adapting David Ignatius’ novel, also keep us clear on who’s who and what Ferris thinks is happening (when he’s meant to be fooled, so are we), which is a good accomplishment, considering the complexity of the narrative.
The filmmakers and the very adept DiCaprio also keep us pretty much on Ferris’ side, which is where the moral emphasis of BODY OF LIES arguably goes a bit off the rails. It’s one thing for Ferris to be so enthusiastic about what is admittedly a very crafty idea and for Hoffman to be the embodiment of the concept of an Ugly American, but the film itself treats their framing of a Middle Eastern Everyman as a subplot, a minor detail, rather than something that should make us take a very serious look at the protagonist. BODY OF LIES wants to have it both ways, to be an indictment of some very dubious tactics, a la THE GOOD SHEPHERD, while still making us root for Ferris. Emotionally, it sort of works; intellectually, it makes us go, “Wait a minute …” This may in fact be the intent, but we get so little time with Suliman’s character that, from the film’s point of view, he barely seems to be a real person.
There’s also the more minor but absolutely unaddressed question of why the C.I.A. would assign someone with the surname Hoffman to liaise with Arab countries. Is this supposed to show us that Hoffman is so good at his job that his bosses figure it doesn’t matter, that the C.I.A. supports Hoffman wholeheartedly and is thumbing its nose at foreign prejudices, or if this is the Agency’s way of trying to show friendly Middle Eastern countries outside of Israel that not all Jews are evil (if so, you’d think they’d find somebody a little more diplomatic than Hoffman for the task)? It’s never brought up and it’s impossible to surmise the intent of this detail.
DiCaprio is excellent as a man who has genuine expertise in his field and strong intuition for how to behave in any given situation. Crowe makes Hoffman the epitome of the alpha male good ol’ boy with an ego and worldview that sometimes serve him and sometimes get the better of his strategies. Strong is wonderfully urbane as the Jordanian spy chief and Golshifteh Farahani is very personable as a local nurse who doesn’t know how to react to Ferris’ courtship.
Where BODY OF LIES does succeed very well is in demonstrating the multitude of ways in which even very well-thought-out plans to make the world safer can become not only corrupted but can also be hopelessly compromised by other likewise world-safety-minded but conflicting plans. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a very plausible one.
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