Good directors always have a point of view, and Robert Redford is no exception. Once a gorgeous leading man, he has emerged in the past years as a fine director. What he's always been is a political and environmental activist. So "Lions for Lambs," coming from him, should be no surprise.
The film, which runs only 88 minutes, shows us three scenarios: a Senator (Tom Cruise) handing an intelligent reporter (Meryl Streep) a "new plan" for the war in Iraq, which is nothing more than a strategy from the Vietnam War that didn't work; a professor (Redford) prodding a lazy student (Andrew Garfield) about his beliefs and urging him to be an active, not passive participant in the world; and two Army rangers (Derek Luke and Michael Peña) behind enemy lines in freezing Afghanistan. The reporter doesn't want to write the story given to her by the Senator because she feels it's false, but she needs her job; the hawk Senator is, after all, only doing his job, as is the professor; and the two soldiers are doing theirs.
This could have been a stunning film - as it is, it does hold interest despite being very talky. The stark picture of the soldiers juxtaposed with the Senator in his well-tailored suit ("says he in the air-conditioned room," Streep reminds him as he's talking about the war) is a sad reminder that for all the plans, the statistics and the estimates, soldiers are human beings, and young human beings at that, committed to what they're doing - and the professor's student could easily have been one of them, freezing in Afgahanistan instead of contemplating his life. In fact, the two soldiers were the professor's students.
Despite what others have said, there aren't any true good guys or bad guys in "Lions for Lambs." Talk is cheap (and there's plenty of it in this movie) - it's easy, detached from a set of circumstances, to intellectualize it or to work it like a chess set. It's easy to say you don't believe something and won't write it - when your job is threatened, you fold. What the film has is two heroes. Despite what everybody talks about in the movie, two people literally put their lives on the line. For what? Well, that's for you to decide.
