Geopolitical headgames hit home

"Syriana" is a tough nut to crack. After three viewings I'm still not sure who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and how all the pieces fit together. That is exactly the point, and writer/director Stephen Gaghan pulls it all off with the deliberate assurance of a spreading terminal cancer; a cancer of oil addiction, terrorism and governmental corruption which everyone involved is powerless to cure.\nGaghan is no stranger to penning sprawling character mosaics mired in politics and ulterior motives. His screenplay for "Traffic" (one of the best films of the last 10 years) won him an Oscar in 2001, and Syriana's screenplay won him a nomination earlier this year. As with "Traffic," which dealt deftly with the war on drugs, "Syriana" pulls no punches in its exploration of another war in progress; that of oil companies vs. the American people and Middle East in tandem.\nThe ensemble cast, including George Clooney (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), Jeffrey Wright, Matt Damon, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet, Christopher Plummer and Alexander Siddig, is uniformly spot-on. Robert Elswit's cinematography is poignant in its shaky ambivalence and use of light and shadow, and editor Tim Squyres works magic with myriad plotlines and subtle character arcs. From a purely technical standpoint, "Syriana" is nearly flawless.\nMany conservatives will denounce "Syriana" because it portrays homegrown terrorists in a less than despicable light. An equal number of liberals and progressives will denounce it because it treats oil barons, government spies and the military infrastructure with the same leniency. As the cast and crew explain throughout the special features, one's political affiliation is hardly relevant when it comes to the dependence we as Americans have on oil. Striving to ween ourselves off the substance will, in time, become as inherently American as ranch dressing and jazz-rock.\nThere are only about 20 minutes of special features included on this disc and, despite the fact the film is so dense that it hardly speaks for itself upon an initial viewing, that's alright. Alongside three deleted scenes that become lost in the opaque layers of the rest of the film, there are two mini-docs included. The first is a brief but lively discussion with producer/star George Clooney concerning his weight gain, Arabic language lessons, world travel and feelings that Gaghan's screenplay is the true star of the film. The second is a slightly meatier rumination on how the movie palpably and alarmingly highlights real world issues that need fixing regardless of one's political affiliation.\n"Syriana" functions not only as a cautionary tale, but as a engaging piece of dense dramatic cinema. While never overtly explained in the film itself, the title "Syriana" is apparently a term coined by the U.S. government and the oil industry to denote an ideal Middle Eastern state. How our government and the oil companies in it's pocket define such a state is debatable, while the only fact that is absolute is that we must curb our dependence on oil usage and carbon dioxide emissions before we gloriously self-implode.