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.

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.