Pseudo-relevance

Syriana Directed by Stephen Gaghan  

Traffic, the 2000 all-star war-on-drugs movie, was fatuous enough. Now Traffic's screenwriter Stephen Gaghan posits the CIA's involvement in oil-dealing with Arab nations in the offensively titled Syriana. The film's press notes credit the title to a Washington, D.C., think-tank term that describes a hypothetically gerrymandered Middle East of corporate nations. But it's also got a Mad magazine aspect of absurdist symbolism that reveals Gaghan's essential lack of seriousness.

Although Syriana is not a satire, Gaghan's middlebrow musing on political guilt is, really, silly. One of the film's producers, Steven Traffic-cop Soderbergh, is quoted: "Gaghan once said to me that he thought oil was the world's crack addiction." That self-satisfied tendency to conflate one social crisis into another is a different kind of cracklike you get from TV pundits. Coming from a Hollywood big shot, it demonstrates the filmmakers' temerity and their utter lack of imagination.

Gaghan tries encapsulating the world in his Alfred E. Neuman conceit. Like Traffic, his plot gridlocks five storylines: George Clooney as a CIA agent, Matt Damon as an energy analyst, Jeffrey Wright as a government lawyer overseeing a major oil company merger, Alexander Siddig as the prince of a fictitious Gulf region country and Mazhur Munir as a Pakistani migrant worker who is seduced into terrorism. Gaghan bids to become the Claude LeLouch of globetrotting political porn. He wants audiences to feel that they are as smart and concerned as he is while watching his crisscrossing, roman a clef games. He gives himself away in the torture scene where Clooney is saved from a fatal Abu Ghraib payback by the last-minute arrival of an Imam named Said Hashimiguilt-titillated viewers are meant to get high on the Imam's funny weed name.

Too bad we're in a state where audiences don't have the sanity-saving confidence to laugh at Gaghan's pretense. (His spreadsheet storytelling style is not brilliant, just draftsmanship.) Each character's home life detail exploits our political frustration and then Gaghan piles on speeches such as Tim Blake Nelson as a Texas oilman fulminating "Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm." That's derived from the "greed" speech in Wall Street, but it mainly seems a rationale for Hollywood's own practices.

Post-9/11 Hollywood corrupts our view of global affairs. The Interpreter, Lord of War, The Constant Gardener and Syriana are inane dramatizations that should not be confused with political analyses. None of them equal the poetic political insight found in Minority Report, Demme's Manchurian Candidate, Sahara or Transporter 2 (despite coincidental plot points). Unlike those films, Syriana is not propelled by love of narrative skill, history, or even reform, just Gaghan's liberal self-righteousness. The giveaway: casting Jeffrey Wright in the token Benecio Del Toro role of troubled conscience. Wright pronounces Gaghan's corrupt creed: "We're looking for the illusion of due diligence."

Rent

Directed by Chris Columbus

Not since Richard Attenborough's 1985 film of A Chorus Line has a celebrated Broadway musical gone splat on the screen. Rent flattens out loudly. A friend called it "One big yell fest" because the cast of pretend East Village bohemians do not sing, they scream. The unfathomably praised score by late composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson is a species of Broadway "rock" that really has no constituency beyond tourists and musical-theater die-hards. (No singer has been able to make a chart hit of any single song from Rent.) The guitar solos are prosaic, not virtuosic, and the drumming is assaultive rather than rhythmic or dynamic. Its story is set in 1989, yet there's no hint that New York was rocking to the advent of hip-hop. That this catastrophe was turned into a movie at all merely attests to the nostalgic influence of the Broadway musicala now-obsolete institution.

The idea that Rent speaks to the concerns of the day was false even when it premiered in the mid-'90s. Decades after Hair and West Side Story dared tell stories outside Broadway's usual purview, Rent seemed derivative, not original. Making a modern day version of Puccini's La Boheme certainly flattered those hipoisie raised on Reagan but it was corporate-think, an idea that even a staunch non-avant-gardist like Andrew Lloyd Webber might have left on his back burner. For people accustomed to Stephen Sondheim elitism and Jerry Herman revivals, a musical about ragamuffin urban squatters, struggling artists and AIDS sufferers probably seemed so outrageously topical that they neglected to realize it was merely opportunistic.

On screen, as on stage, Rent's noisy aggression becomes offensive. The opening chorus "We're not gonna pay rent/Rent, rent, rent, rent, rent" is laughably absurd given today's high ticket prices. Worst of all, the song isn't a call to insurrection but a glib and imprecise pandering to the discontent of city life. (Not Brecht's Threepenny Opera but a three-card Monte opera.) It not only lacks a musical hook, but there's no philosophical allure. Larson imitated Hair's counterculture mode and, with strident insincerity, attempted to pass off the Clinton era self-righteousness of grant-applicants, pseudo-bohemians and yuppie gentry as the voice of rebellion. (A dubious subplot involves a protest against a black slumlord.)

For director Chris Columbus Rent is obviously just another brand-name adaptation like his Harry Potter films. Columbus accepts the myth of Rent's significance without bothering to rethink or make it credible. He's even stuck to most of the original cast membersTaye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Adam Pascal, Anthony Rappeach one now way too old to play struggling youth. Daphne Rubin-Vega is missing, replaced by Rosario Dawson in the central role of the consumptive stripper Mimi. Since Dawson is not a proven box-office star, it is puzzling why Columbus did not preserve the entire original cast. Loyalty would at least give it some integrity.

Columbus missed the chance to fix the show's irrelevance by completely recasting it with contemporary pop stars who might have had freshness in their favor. Wide-eyed, ripe-lipped Dawson repeats the same blatant raunchiness that Spike Lee exploited in He Got Game and The 25th Hour. She's a hot-looking chick hetero directors can't help but misuse. Her Mimi should galvanize the movienot just a misguided ecdysiast and junkie but the epitome of a failed careerist, focusing the others' gaudiest, most desperate hopes.

Rent's unprepossessing screen cast merely reiterates the show's fallacious concept. Because Larson lacked any real social insight, his fabrication of a new bohemia was nothing more than the sentimental yearning of a not-yet-arrived cultural class. He invoked the AIDS crisis ("Take your AZT") for pseudo-relevance that other contemporary Broadway musicals had the cowardly good taste to avoid. (Only Menzel and Tracie Thoms performing the lesbian lovers' spat "Take Me or Leave Me" reveals new sex etiquette.) Still, Rent is not a counterpart to Angels in America. It has neither Tony Kushner's political critique nor his spiritual ambition. Some vague form of hipoisie sentiment is expressed in the song "Life Support," a chilly attempt at profoundity: "There's no future, there's no past/ There's only us/ There's only this/ Forget regret/ No day but today." This is a song of fashionable disbeliefshowbiz nihilism based on the privilege of those who don't have to think hard. It's cynicism sung at deafening decibels.