The Winds of War, Strangely Calm

'Lions for Lambs' Is Too Paws-Off

Crisply turned out in an impeccably starched white shirt, Tom Cruise resembles the human version of one of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" in "Lions for Lambs," an impassioned but strangely inert current-events drama directed by Robert Redford.

Cruise plays a fictional Republican U.S. senator named Jasper Irving, a bright, charismatic young gun whose good looks, spit-shine image and West Point credentials Cruise projects with characteristic force and focus. As "Lions for Lambs" opens, Irving welcomes reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) into his office for an hour-long interview. As Roth opens her notebook, Irving reveals his true agenda: to give her a scoop about a new military initiative in Afghanistan, one involving small, light forces serving in risky forward positions on the country's most forbidding terrain. When is the policy going to take effect, Roth asks? "Ten minutes ago," Irving responds.

While Irving and Roth spar about strategy, history, 9/11 and Vietnam, "Lions for Lambs" introduces scenes unfolding elsewhere at exactly the same time: In Afghanistan, two Special Forces soldiers deploy to a snowy mountaintop as part of the shakedown cruise of the new policy. Meanwhile, at an unnamed university in California, political science professor Stephen Malley (Redford) has called his most promising student, Todd Hayes (British actor Andrew Garfield), to his office for a come-to-Jesus speech about his academic performance.

Intercutting among the three contemporaneous scenes, "Lions for Lambs" sets up an arresting conceit, wherein politics, theory and practice are played out in real time. While Roth, who senses she's being played, warily banters with Irving about the virtues and contradictions of U.S. foreign policy (where he sees American righteousness, she sees quagmires and cannon fodder), Malley tries desperately to startle Hayes out of his frat-boy haze of apathy and entitlement. "Rome is burning, son," Malley says at one point, going on to suggest that every American is either putting out the fire or fiddling.

Whereas the encounters in Washington and California have their moments of stirring rhetorical power (it's a particular pleasure to watch Streep and Cruise have at one another), ultimately they amount to shots of two people talking across a desk. Redford, who has proven a fluent director with such efforts as "Ordinary People" and "Quiz Show," is stymied by a talky script by Matthew Michael Carnahan that would be more at home on a small theater stage. The only action to speak of occurs in Afghanistan, where Arian Finch (Derek Luke) and Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Pe¿a) do their talking in a transport helicopter and across a moonlit snowfield. (It bears noting that Carnahan also wrote "The Kingdom," directed by Peter Berg, who shows up in a cameo as the men's commanding officer.)

If "Lions for Lambs" is all talk, it still bristles with conviction, with Redford's speeches obviously conveying the filmmaker's own credo, which combines disgust about the state of current political affairs with deep-seated patriotism and idealism. When Streep's character faces a fateful journalistic choice in Washington (let's call it the Judith Miller Conundrum), it's impossible not to see the ghost of Redford's Bob Woodward in "All the President's Men" and understand how far Redford believes journalism has fallen from its sacred skeptical perch.

For all its passion and topical currency, "Lions for Lambs" plays too often like a college colloquium, with one extended scene of a classroom debate suffering from all the sleep-inducing effects of the real thing. And it ends on a curiously unsatisfying note, with each character's choice, whether fateful or fatal, hanging in a confounding limbo of indeterminacy.

Ambiguity is always a more sophisticated choice than neat ribbons and bows, and there's certainly room in the cinematic universe for movies that raise more questions than they answer. But even those who are sympathetic with Redford's sentiments and call to action may find themselves frustrated by a movie that wants to have it both ways, setting up an intriguing, high-stakes framework but finally refusing to hang anything on it. "Lions for Lambs" might have worked as a digital-video experiment or an op-ed column, but as a movie it chooses to lie down just when it should roar.

Lions for Lambs (88 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for some war violence and profanity.