In addition to its requisite genre offerings, the fall is a crowded marketplace for prestige pictures — mostly dramas and thrillers with familiar faces, all making a play for little gold trophies. For every occasional exception to the rule (The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the top-shelf Oscar prizes in 1992 after being released in February of the previous year), there is a harsh reminder that releasing too soon can create a memory gap, and potentially cost studios significant awards victories, and thus all the cachet that comes with it. Saving Private Ryan, for instance, released in the summer months of 1998 and grossed over $200 million domestically, but was perceived to have lost the battle for buzz, and thus the Best Picture Academy Award, to a more traditional December entry, Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love.



To that end, studios jostle for screens and autumnal release dates, preferably in the last two months of the year. The awards season has its own playbook, certainly, but studio executives, their publicity departments and personal publicists alike are always looking for both innovative new strategies and ways to copy approaches that have worked in the past. For their political thriller Lions for Lambs, distributor United Artists, looking to make a big splash since Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner took over, need only cast their recollections back two years for a good idea.

James Mangold, a respected filmmaker who had never had a real breakout hit to his credit — barely cracking the $50 million mark in domestic gate with his previous release, the extremely marketable ensemble thriller Identity — saw his Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, benefit from a gala opening night presentation at the AFI Fest. Held annually in November in Hollywood, and for the past several years at the attractive ArcLight Theatre, the festival comes late in the calendar year, and with many pictures having already debuted at Sundance, Cannes or Toronto, finds itself in the position of looking for a few commercial touchstones to help anchor its many other worthwhile international presentations, coffee talks, and independent and documentary offerings.

Positioned just a week and change in advance of its national opening, the red carpet walk for Walk the Line’s premiere generated big, national entertainment news coverage from Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, USA Today and the like. A $22 million opening weekend soon followed, and the movie went on to gross just under $120 million domestically, play for over five months, and pick up five Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress win for Reese Witherspoon.

While it’s hardly lacking for star power or embedded respectability, Lions for Lambs looks to be following the Walk the Line playbook. Directed by Robert Redford, and starring him, Cruise and Meryl Streep, the movie saw its North American premiere on November 1 in two theaters at the ArcLight, with a simultaneous overflow presentation at the adjacent Cinerama Dome. Time will tell if this strategy works as well for Lions for Lambs as it did for Walk the Line, but one thing appears certain: a new pre-release tactic for glossy Hollywood dramas has emerged, one that has all the inherent advantages of being an in-town production.

Lions for Lambs takes place on three equally tense and emotional fronts, each with considerable personal stakes. In a Congressional office, up-and-coming Republican Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise), a possible presidential hopeful somewhere down the line, is about to feed a bombshell scoop about a new war strategy in Afghanistan to a probing, liberal-leaning TV journalist (Streep) as the two carry out a fierce, cat-and-mouse game of wit, charm and evasion during an hour-long, one-on-one interview. At a west coast university, meanwhile, a once idealistic professor, Dr. Malley (Redford) confronts a privileged but blasé student (Andrew Garfield) in danger of never fulfilling his enormous potential. At the same time, across the globe, two of Dr. Malley’s former students, Army enlistees Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña), lay bare the debates and arguments of mentors and politicians in a stark fight for sheer survival, the heart-wrenching consequences of which will reverberate through all of their lives.

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan — and perhaps joined by Cruise as pittance for tying up his brother, Joe Carnahan, so long in Mission: Impossible III pre-production, only to eventually part ways with him — Lions for Lambs is a movie that’s destined to be noted in two-thirds of all reviews as “having it heart in the right place.” Alternately invigoratingly topical and frustratingly didactic, the movie assays the flickering flame of idealism with a contempt that’s ultimately less rousing than depressing.

There are several pieces of clip-worthy acting here, particularly from Streep — both in her circuitous grappling with Cruise’s character, and in a meeting with her editor after the fact, where she, in a panicked but clear and shrewdly comprehensible fashion, asserts a hearty apportioning of self-blame for the media’s complicity in spoon-feeding the public the chirping rhetoric of an administration gone astray. And the film has the courage to let its characters fully embrace their roles. There’s no pussyfooting around the differences of opinion on display, and there’s no resisting the clarion call truth of one of its essential themes: that troubled times are a call to action.

Still, Lions for Lambs is essentially a film as op-ed piece, and only the circling-jackals segment between Cruise and Streep really catches fire in one’s imagination, pulling them forward to the edge of their seat. The other strands — like this one well-written in that they’re articulate and reasoned, no matter the point-of-view being espoused — don’t have enough natural pull, and even though things are eventually wrapped together, catharsis is forestalled in the name of entreaty. And films that ask rather than tell elicit strange feelings indeed; to borrow a song title from the more cinematically fortunate Cash, this flick is a “Ragged Old Flag.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.