Yep, Rome's Burning

Robert Redford’s "Lions for Lambs" is one- half foreign policy editorial, and one-half anti-war polemic. It’s also one-half of a film.

Written by Mathew Michael Carnahan, fresh from his cartoon of a script for "The Kingdom," "Lions" ranges wide in its discussion of the use of American force overseas, the nature of democratic citizenship, and that tiny question of How We Live Today.

Redford, who appears in

"Lion" as Prof. Stephen Malley, the world’s most attentive college professor, is clearly enraged by the war in Iraq and its resulting moral incoherence.

"Lions" makes several references to American failures — oil, TV and our nation’s habit of nodding off during the bad parts. None of these are new ideas, of course. But Redford is earnest; the man means what he says. If good intentions made good movies, "Lions" might be, if not a classic, well, better than it is.

The film’s structure doesn’t help things. "Lions" is in fact three movies, dialogues, really, interwoven, each a set piece between two actors.

In the first, Jasper Irving, an ambitious Republican senator (Tom Cruise) unveils a new offensive in the war on terror to Janine Roth, a journalist (Meryl Streep, in a dutifully skeptical turn) who, we learn, made the senator’s reputation with her magazine profile of him eight years earlier. The senator, as he explains himself, is going to return her the favor.

In the second movie, we watch the offensive as it unfolds — disastrously,

in the case of two soldiers (Michael Peña and Derek Luke), who are left stranded on a mountaintop in Afghanistan, with the Taliban closing in.

And third, we listen to Dean Redford as he lectures a cynical, disengaged college student (Todd Hayes) on the responsibilities of citizenship. He’s about as charismatic as a school marm.

Though his face may be worn with age, Redford hasn’t changed much as

an actor since he established himself in the early 1970s, playing warm

and mordant types in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The

Candidate." Redford’s politics (the actor is an active liberal, and once considered a run for the Senate) don’t appear to have changed much since then, either. The professor’s speech to the student seems to belong to an earlier era of 1960s civil unrest.

"Rome is burning, son," he says, gesturing to the nasty scar he earned at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The look of "Lions" is even less exciting, which surprises me. As a director, Redford has shown himself to be nothing if not capable, even elegant — notice, for instance, the lyrical murmur and thrush of "A

River Runs Through It" or the intelligent, exacting dramaturgy of "Quiz Show," with its candied blues and burnished chromes. But "Lions" is formally elegant. Movies are a visual medium, not merely conversational, as in the case of radio. Watching two actors talk in front of a static camera is to wonder why Redford decided to make a

film at all.

The best of the "Lions" dialogues is the one that runs on the marquee: Cruise vs. Streep, with Cruise taking an early lead. Flashing his white teeth like a shark, Cruise’s senator is both a con man and true believer, and he chews through reporter Roth’s dutiful questioning. Onscreen, as off, Cruise is uncomfortable to watch; his enthusiasm is a coverup for an absence of personality. And the senator’s character is no different. Asked about the woeful intelligence failures that led to Iraq, Irving doesn’t apologize so much as divert blame back onto Roth and her employer (the American media) for sounding its electronic trumpet and leading the charge to war.

It’s at this moment that Redford moves beyond stark relief to acknowledge the fraught and still unexamined. Judging by "Lions," Redford feels awful about the whole thing.

Just like everyone else.

"Lions for Lambs" is

playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and at

Cinerom in Winsted, CT. It is rated R for war violence and language.