by Nathan Wada

Created on: March 02, 2010

Per the admission of a preponderance of professional film critics, the plot of Syriana is nearly impossible to follow.  That intentional contrivance is the film's salient strength.

Ellipses prevail as the principal cinematic technique/rhetorical device/philosophical couching in writer/director Stephen Gaghan's frenetic, edgy geopolitical thriller.  Gaghan, with eager, wanton disregard for expositional intercession, repeatedly drops the viewer into the tail end of some hushed, shadowy conversation or dealing.  The viewer, blinking and still discombobulated from the hooded ride over, scrambles to come to terms with each new locale and development. That, ostensibly, is what makes it fun.

Syriana, which derives from Washington think-tank parlance for the Middle East oil region, taps a number of unctuously evasive skeins of plot that, all due credit to Gaghan in just his second directorial turn, converge in a tolerably coherent fashion into both its narrative and political conclusions. The four - formerly five - main storylines all revolve in some way around a nameless oil-rich Middle Eastern emirate. The principals in this talent-rich ensemble cast are Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a world-weary CIA agent we find in what can euphemistically be called a mid-life career rut.  Bennet Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is a Washington lawyer commissioned to perform "exhaustive due diligence" on a merger between two energy companies. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) a financial analyst living with his young family in expatriate luxury in Geneva, takes an advisory position to Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who is chomping at the bit to succeed his father as emir and usher in a program of political and economic reform. In Prince Nasir's country, meanwhile, a young Pakistani laborer named Wasim (Mazhar Munir) ponders what course to take after recently being laid off.

Gaghan, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000 for Traffic, plies giddy zeal into this hodgepodge opus that Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert cited as an exemplar of the hyperlink cinematic technique wherein "the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one ... I liked the way I experienced the film: I couldn't explain the story, but I never felt lost in it. I understood who, what, when, where and why, but not how they connected. That was how I wanted to relate to it." 

Enthusiastic obfuscation seems indeed to be Gaghan's intent,

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