Meryl Streep tries to restrain herself from strangling Tom Cruise.

In a way, you have to admire the film’s resolve to connect all the dots in the exhausted debate over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does so with a handful of contrivances that distract from the film’s genuine sadness over the state of the union.  That its only substantial message is that the battle for America’s future takes place in the fabled halls of higher education, Congress, newsrooms, and the battlefield, and that each of these arenas is related, is only a little condescending.  What’s harder to excuse is the film’s cursory presentation, weaving three rather thin strands of narrative with all the dexterity of a high school civics student.

Tom Cruise plays Senator Jasper Irving, a youngish neocon rock star trying to sell the American people on a new plan to win the war in Afghanistan, and Meryl Streep plays herself as a weathered but sharp hound dog of a journalist trying not to swallow the charismatic senator’s drivel.  As it turns out, Cruise fits perfectly the role of a guy who would much rather bully and dance around his interviewer than address her questions or validate his bogus ideas.  It’s a performance of a performance that amusingly recalls his infamous spot with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show.  For her part, Streep effectively thrusts and parries.

We see Senator Irving’s new strategy at work in Afghanistan, and surprisingly enough it’s not working for the soldiers on the ground.  The cosmic playthings are Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Pena), two soldiers who fall out of an Army chopper during an RPG attack and get stuck on a snowy mountainside in Afghanistan, the Taliban lurking nearby.  Herein lies the only action - as you may have heard, the rest of the film consists of circular arguments - but it’s also the most contrived strand of the film, which is a shame because it didn’t have to be.  The connection between incompetent or non-existant political objectives and military failure on the ground isn’t a hard one to make, but Lions for Lambs thinks that it might be, so it unnaturally ventures into allegorical territory.  In case you forgot that Afghanistan is the “forgotten front,” the script literally strands Ernest and Arian in the middle of nowhere without a leg to stand on.  Literally.

Then there’s Dr. Malley (Robert Redford), a political scientist who once instructed Ernest and Arian at a California university.  Guilt-stricken at the idea that his lectures on civic duty may have inspired two of his noblest students to join up, he still tries to rescue Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), his most talented but lazy pupil, from a life of cheap cynicism and complacency.  Malley wants to know why Todd doesn’t care about anything, and Todd wants to know why he should care about anything.  Inevitably, they come to the conclusion that even if  Todd can’t make a dent in the state of affairs, at least he can try for the sake of trying. 

But the film is confused on this point.  It argues that the only thing worse than getting stranded on a mountain with broken legs and no ammo is apathy, a rather romantic notion of civic duty that it rejects elsewhere, qualifying the notion of service with the reality of what happens to good people who try to make a difference.  Malley recalls with criticism World War I and the archetypal Abraham and Isaac scenario, where the oligarchic older generation readily sacrifices the younger generation for a good that, in most cases, isn’t all that great.  Then he turns around and commends Ernest and Arian, soldiers in a dubious war, as good examples for his current students because at least they were willing to act on their ideas.  There’s value in action for action’s sake, regardless of the ideology behind it.

Well, couldn’t that argument be used to justify terrorism?  The war in Iraq?  While it was considerate of Redford and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan to try to argue this point as a foil to complacency, the argument really only works if you have a rather nuanced definition of the word “action.”  Something tells me Hollywood’s definition is pretty nuanced.

I wrestled with these objections as I left the theatre, and to that end, Redford’s film is a success.  Lions for Lambs can’t reasonably hope to do much more than make audiences think about what they already think about America’s future.  The fact that it fails to inspire the same look of profundity on Todd’s face that concludes the film would be only a minor failing had it not announced, once and for all, its intentions by ending on precisely that shot.  Even if it’s only a matter of wishful thinking, nobody likes to be told how to feel.