Hollywood is an industry where people wear their political affiliations blatantly and proudly, as if enblazened on bejeweled Louis Vuitton nametags. Using one's celebrity to advocate a cause or belief has come to be expected. Now that we've grown accustomed to Michael Moore-type acceptance speeches and to Bono's heartfelt testimonies on behalf of the United Nations, it's almost shocking when someone in Hollywood makes a film that is decidedly political in scope, yet refrains from thrusting a partisan agenda upon the audience.
Meet Stephen Gaghan, Academy Award winner for Best Screenplay in 2000 for Traffic, his caustic portrait of the war on drugs. His newest effort, the recently released Syriana (see review, page six) which he both wrote and directed, addresses the "intrigue and corruption of the global oil industry."
Can a film involving issues as controversial as America's foreign policy objectives in the Middle East, the influences of corruption within our own government and the possible root causes of terrorism possibly be amenable to everyone's beliefs? In a nutshell: of course not. And if you were to ask Gaghan, he'd say that you probably wouldn't want it to be, either.
He knows Syriana will offend some people, that it will reiterate others' worst suspicions and that even more people won't see it because they believe it to be some sort of propaganda tool. But seeing the film is the necessary first step in thinking about the issues it raises; thus, he consciously avoided using the film to make any sort of overt political call to arms against the current administration.
"The movie speaks for itself," Gaghan said. "There was a real attempt to be even-handed, to be non-partisan. I'm a moderate from Kentucky. I set out to explore this role with an even mind. Why? Because it makes sense."
Using multiple points of view much like he did in Traffic, Gaghan maintains that in his most recent film, "there are no good guys and no bad buys and no easy answers. The stories don't wrap up in neat little life lessons-the questions remain open."
And this, ultimately, is Gaghan's only objective. He'll do the years of research, traveling through the Middle East, questioning the oil executives and congressmen, even developing a personal friendship with retired CIA operative Bob Baer (See No Evil, Baer's memoir of his CIA career, was the catalyst for Syriana), until he has a framework to ask some questions-questions as broad and as difficult to answer as, "What kind of country do I live in? What kind of war am I a part of? Do I love my country? What does America stand for?"
The way Gaghan sees it, our job as both audience members and as citizens of the world is to be receptive enough to think about these questions instead of dismissing them outright because they force us to re-evaluate our own ideology. "You can discuss, and you can disagree, but it takes an open mind. It takes some reading, it takes some thought, but you can have an open opinion," Gaghan stressed.
Nonetheless, all good intentions aside, Gaghan still has a cynical streak that runs deeper than the pockets of the Big Energy Lobby in Washington. And, as he knows all too well, those are some pretty deep pockets. His cynicism and disenfranchisement with the system drive an obsession that may be the eventual undoing of his neutrality in films: finding and cataloguing corruption in our government and in other institutions of higher authority. In a world where we want to know who agrees with us and who differs, when most of our minds are long made up about how we see our government and its role in the Middle East, it's undoubtedly sad, yet also undoubtedly true, that Gaghan may not be able to claim he is a "Kentucky moderate" for very much longer.
Caitlin Donnelly contributed reporting from Atlanta for this article.
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