Can Ridley Scott's impeccable thriller beat the Middle East jinx?

By Steven Zeitchik

In another place, at another time, "Body of Lies" would be not only a commercial blockbuster but a sturdy awards contender. The spy thriller, which we caught at its premiere Sunday night, has virtues across the board -- not just taut plot twists and deep characterization but subtle comments on the ambiguities of the war on terror, comments that manage to be searing but never partisan.

It's more serious and accomplished than many of the recent awards-feted efforts from its principals -- sharper than screenwriter Bill Monahan's "The Departed" and more richly acted than "Blood Diamond," Leo DiCaprio's other recent role in a pic showing the consequences of the West unleashing moral relativism on the developing world.

As it happens, the movie, which opens Friday, will have its work cut out for it at the box-office, never mind the Academy, where it's unlikely to make a play. This is not a comment on the film, whose appealing elements we can fill five blog posts with. It is, however, a comment on the fact that this is one of the most tactile and jolting political movies to come out of the U.S. -- from Hollywood, Indiewood or any other Wood -- in years: more visceral than "Stop Loss," more urgent than "Redcated," more sweeping and germane than "Rendition" or "The Kingdom."

This is a movie where Al Quaeda is discussed openly (the main character, while officially going by another name, is a character nicknamed the "white whale" and is a pretty transparent stand-in for Osama bin Laden). And the difficulties, moral and political, of guerilla warfare (even though it takes place mostly in the safer precincts of Jordan), are laid bare in a way that could teach a cable-news producer a thing or two.

It's not that anything in it will startle anyone who's followed the news the last seven years. What's startling is that a big-budget, stylishly directed and hugely entertaining movie can be so relevant to contemporary Middle Eastern policy.

Unfortunately, it's in that relevance where the problem lies. Because if the movie is retailed for the deadly accurate geopolitical treatise it can sometimes be, it will fly directly in the face of conventional wisdom about how far into political realms filmgoers will cross for their entertainment. As Kirk Honeycutt crisply puts it in his enthusiastic THR review: "How the action-thriller crowd will react to such a disturbing environment is a tough call."

It's a fascinating experiment, really: a movie of superb chops and immense marketability -- it doesn't get better than Crowe and DiCaprio -- going up against the Middle East jinx, which has heretofore destroyed all who knock their heads against it.

Given this, you can't really blame Warners for proceeding more tentatively in its marketing, from the title (which feels too mushy for what this really is) to the widely disseminated, overly precodural-ish images (like the one above) to current TV spots, which play down the movie's more visceral action scenes, presumably for fear of alienating viewers with too many Middle East explosions (an interesting counterpoint to the thriller-flavored trailer for Miramax's arthouse-metaphor "Blindness," which is adept but equally unrepresentative in the other direction).

What you can do is wonder about what conclusions to draw if the movie -- and we're sincerely hoping this is not the case -- doesn't ignite the box office. There's a tremendous amount of encouragement to be drawn from the fact that a movie of this scope can be pulled off. If it doesn't meet box-office expectations, there will be even more that is deflating.

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[Cliff Tomas]

Just because you mentioned The Middle East JInx...In celebration of the Middle East International Film Festival and its commitment to student films, the UAE Students blog is featuring posts from film students and journalism students discussing Arabic films.
Check it out:
http://uaestudents.blogspot.com/

[cliff tomas]

Just because the story mentioned the Middle East...In celebration of the Middle East International Film Festival and its commitment to student films, the UAE Students blog is featuring posts from film students and journalism students discussing Arabic films.
Check it out:
http://uaestudents.blogspot.com/