Body of Lies

Dir. Ridley Scott, US, 2008, 128 mins (occasional subtitles)

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong

Review by Carol Allen

While Scott’s Black Hawk Down was an all-go action movie with characters and plot that were often difficult to keep track of, this is an intelligent, thought-provoking and well-written drama. It has good action sequences and is sometimes upsettingly, but appropriately, violent but it’s also well plotted and its three leading characters, who represent three different points of view in the film’s argument, are strong and believable people in their own right.

The background is the conflict in the Middle East and the hunt for a shadowy terrorist, who is the mastermind of a network carrying out suicide attacks around Europe. Crowe plays Hoffman, who controls his agent in the field Ferris (DiCaprio) from the safe distance of a high-tech surveillance operations room in Washington and often from the comfort of his own home, while looking after his small son in the cosseted and privileged way of life America believes it’s fighting to save. For opponents of the “war” against terrorism, he is the villain of the piece, embodying everything that is destructive about America’s actions on the world stage. He is arrogant, clumsy in diplomacy, narrow minded in his perceptions and indifferent to the human cost of his decisions, believing that the end justifies the mean.

Ferris, who is at the sharp end, has a much more intelligent awareness of the realities of the conflict. The character is thoughtful, independent minded, educated in Arabic and the Arab culture and frustrated by the often crass orders of his controller. Yet even he displays poor judgement by betraying his Jordanian colleague Hani (Strong) with what he thinks is a clever plan, which achieves nothing apart from getting an innocent man murdered.

The most powerful performance in the film is from Strong as the Jordanian spymaster. He is totally convincing as an Arab and shows great presence as a man, who has his own particular cultural sense of honour. A good friend, but a ruthless and efficient enemy. His friends he addresses always as “my dear”, which Hoffman in his ignorance of the Arab idiom sees fit to mock. Golshifteh Farahani plays the beautiful nurse, who is Ferris’s love interest. Her function in the story is pretty much to be merely the damsel in distress towards the end, apart from an interesting scene, where she takes Ferris home to meet her protective older sister (Lubna Azabal), who argues the political toss with him in a way which gives us yet another viewpoint on the politics of the war.

The film is pretty fair-handed, but ultimately critical of America’s role in the conflict and the message you are left with is that the people best qualified to handle Arab terrorists are the Arab people themselves, who understand their fellows in a way the West totally fails to.