When a friend breathlessly told the French poet Mallarmé that he was full of ideas for poems, Mallarmé replied, "Poems are not made of ideas, but of words." Robert Redford might have done well to keep some version of that dictum in mind while making "Lions for Lambs," perhaps phrased as "Films are not made of words, but of pictures." Despite his own record of accomplishment as a director and a cast of big names, including Redford himself, the movie disappointingly forsakes the visual in favor of the verbal, depending far too heavily on its words.

The film mostly employs a series of long, talky scenes, consisting of conversations between two actors, periodically interrupted by other long, talky scenes. The two major dialogues engage a political science professor (Robert Redford) and his most promising student (Andrew Garfield) at a university in California, while at the same time, a top Washington reporter (Meryl Streep) conducts an exclusive interview with an ambitious United States Senator (Tom Cruise) in his Senate offices. The movie intercuts throughout its length between the two separate but related dialogues, showing in its third structural component something like their logical conclusion in the plight of two soldiers surrounded by enemies on a snowy mountain in Afghanistan.

The professor and his student discuss the apathetic young man's class attendance, his cynicism about politics, his unwillingness to live up to his potential, to commit himself to his studies, and to consider a future involved with something more noble than simply accumulating a lot of money. The senator, on the other hand, delivers a slick, glib, impassioned lecture to the disbelieving reporter, laying out the administration's latest strategy for the so-called war on terror. Meanwhile, two of the professor's former students, an African American and a Mexican-American, who indeed committed themselves to action by enlisting, lie wounded on a snowy mountaintop, carrying out the brilliant new strategy, which of course looks very like the failed old one.

Instead of emphasizing the moral or ethical problems that the professor raises with his student, the picture in effect assumes a neutral stance. Their long conversation culminates in a rather lame conclusion about the need for engagement, but the student returns to his fraternity house without deciding anything, apparently content to dwell among his fellow slackers. Realizing that the administration manipulated the press in the past, that she and her colleagues assisted mightily in supporting the invasion of Iraq, the dubious reporter tells her editor of her qualms and doubts, but leaves her offices without any clear decision about running the interview.

The specific conversations themselves appear stagy and even self conscious, generally unconvincing in their pat lines and hollow attempts at sincerity. For an actor whose great strength usually derives from his reticence in speech and manner, Robert Redford turns amazingly loquacious in "Lions for Lambs" and his few moments in the classroom seem mostly embarrassing in their fake, stiff attempts at professorial informality. Even his office, the usual large, luxurious room Hollywood provides for its professors, displays about the same level of reality as his pedantic chat with the sullen student.

Poor Meryl Streep must look alert and interested during Tom Cruise's long monologue, interrupting only occasionally with a murmur of disbelief; the script allows her very few words and almost no emotion. No wonder she looks tired and troubled, without any of the spark or strength she displays in her grand work in the past. Talking almost without pause, oozing buckets of fraudulent charm, Cruise himself quite properly seems as smooth and shallow as the average politician selling the usual lies to the adoring sycophants of the media.

The picture's failure derives from the director's apparently deliberate rejection of the historic power of the cinema, to present images in motion capable of narration without words. As a result of that decision, "Lions for Lambs" resembles the propaganda flicks of World War II, even some of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series, only without the vigorous action, the sense of urgency, the appeal to emotion, and finally, any convincing answers to its questions. 

Lions for Lambs

(R), directed by Robert Redford

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