Warren on Redford’s America

Spencer Warren writes in his latest movie review:

Lions for Lambs is what a Bill Moyers movie would be if he ever made one. Or, put another way, Redford should have booked himself on the Moyers program for a thirty minute interview instead. There he could have made his points more cogently, at much less expense (the taxpayers would have picked up part of the bill for Moyers’s PBS program), and perhaps to more people than will see his film, which also is proving a box office flop.

And then this, which gives us the full draught of Redford’s Moyers-like world view:

In the film’s first blatant contrivance, the Senator, evidently with official sanction, is giving Janine an exclusive on the great new forward base strategy our forces are executing in Afghanistan even as he speaks. Of course, such a disclosure would come from the executive branch, not the Congress. This gives Redford and his screenwriter the opportunity to frame a very long debate between the hawk Senator and the skeptical journalist. She felt snookered on the Iraq war in 2003 (or maybe she thinks she was lied to about Afghanistan and 9-11 as well—Redford makes this vague, perhaps deliberately) but now is asking the questions she regrets not asking before. They talk and talk, back and forth, on and on.

The second scene takes us to Afghanistan, where a helicopter is transporting U.S. special forces to the first such special base. This so-called “strategy” is the second contrivance; it makes no sense and is designed to depict two of the soldiers, a Hispanic and a Black, getting the shaft by the Senator and all the civilian higher-ups: the helicopter is shot down and they are the sole survivors, trapped in a snow-filled mountain-pass, surrounded by Taliban fighters. They are the “lions” of the title, who pay with their young lives for the hubris of the white establishment personified by Senator Irving, who, we learn, served in the military only in intelligence, not in a combat unit. The Senator represents the “lambs” of the title.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2007 10:18 AM | Send