Lions for Lambs Review

Don't believe the bad reviews, Lions for Lambs is actually a very good movie. It certainly had flaws--may have been overly talky in some areas and parts of it stretched on too long, but it's certainly a very engaging drama. Tom Cruise also pulls off a remarkable performance as a senator attempting to grease his way to the White House through a new military strategy in Afghanistan. Although one would expect a cartoonishly villainous conservative in a Robert Redford-directed film, Cruise's senator is multidimensional, persuasive, and the most developed and human character in the film. Although he is meant to stand in for Bush/Dick Cheney, he surpasses them greatly.

The actual strategy Cruise's character, Senator Jasper Irving, pushes for is interesting. It reads like the Petraeus plan on steroids--"forward operating points" of a few men deployed on high mountain ridges to deny the Taliban the high ground. Of course, things do not go as planned, and Irving in any case makes a crucial error. Not only does his plan lack the numbers for the kind of blockhouse/isolation strategy (as old as counterinsurgency itself) to succeed, but he misjudges the enemy's center of gravity. Controlling a few geographic points is not the objective, controlling the people is. This is reflected in his debate with Meryl Streep's journalist character when Irving dismisses the utility of "building clinics" in favor of a pure annihilation of the insurgents and their Iranian patron.

Amusingly enough, the "California University" where Robert Redford's character teaches is a thinly disguised Pitzer College.