Oh, Syriana.  Why did you have to be so inaccessible?  Viewers – be they paying customers or Oscar voters – who don’t have a rudimentary knowledge of the various socio-political goings on of the Middle East, are going to be more lost than Katie Holmes when asked how her and Tommy met.  You could have been a great, important film, with a great, important message.  Despite your pedigree, and your star power, and all of your good intentions, people are going to hate you.  I mean, really hate you.  As in I-want-my-money-back hate you.  And that’s just depressing.

Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, Syriana follows three Americans in their various endeavors in and pertaining to the Middle East.  George Clooney has been carrying out undercover assignments in the region for years, but has never really questioned his actions or those of the the people he’s working for until something goes wrong and he’s left out in the cold.  Matt Damon is an oil consultant who loses a son in an accident and actually capitalizes on the misfortune by cozying up to an Arab prince (Alexander Siddig) that could, under his tutelage, become the area’s biggest power broker.  Jeffrey Wright is an attorney investigating the merger between an enormous oil company and a smaller one with potentially lucrative rights to lay their pipe through a strategically located Arab country.  Heh-heh. You said "lay their pipe."

Syriana, whose title comes from the dream name of a unified Arab state, is a dense undertaking that drops you in the middle of three unique, confusing situations, doesn’t give you much background about the characters or their motives, and leaves you wondering how (or if) the three threads will ever connect at any point.  It’s a gorgeous, well-acted (by a gaggle of successful directors, in Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and Thomas McCarthy), Soderbergh-y undertaking, but it’s going to go over like a fart in church.  America wants Cheaper by the Dozen 2; not to be disparaged because they’re too dumb and too fat and drove cars that consume way too much gas to get to the theatre.  There’s still an audience for Syriana, but it certainly isn’t in mainstream googaplexes, which sadly, is where you’ll find it this weekend.  And it's just not dumbed down enough for that crowd.

2:06 –

for violence and language