by Subhash K Jha

Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper
Directed by Stephen Ghaghan
Rating: ** ½

The thing about Syriana is that it's a boys' movie, not in the way, say Oceans' 11 or The Sting were. The boys here play big games that traverse countries and continents for big bucks.

And we're talking in billions.

No wonder first-time director Stephen Gaghan (who wrote the equally dense Traffic) has cast some of Hollywood's most recognizable faces in crucial rules.

But the stars are unrecognizable in their adopted Gulf turf. Almost like the Matt Damon character who tells his wife on the cellphone that Beirut is like the Paris of the gulf, these Hollywood stars bridge the gulf between the cinematics of political intrigue and the documented realism that Gaghan aims to gain in his cruelly unflinching look at power equations in the Gulf.

Not so much the politics, it's the milieu of imminent catastrophe fobbed off by a cluster of restless master-minds on the move, manoeuvring through a maze of political intrigue where greed is a prerequisite and selfinterest is swathed in coded political jargon, that keeps us involved in the clutter of kaleidoscopic characters in Syriana.

There's a vast ocean of characters swimming in the oil-spill that seems to occupy the center of the plot—I say 'seems' because there's an excessive amount of socio-political and religious synergy swimming on the surface of this restless drama of deceit.

Some of the fringe characters are Pakistani immigrant labourers in the Gulf. We hear them banter, joke and pontificate in Urdu. The Arab characters have their own acerbic comments on how their country and culture are being plundered by first-world entrepreneur-politicians.

The deals are stuck in harsh uninviting places.

By the end of the confounding tale of politics and opportunism it's hard to tell who's on which side, and why it is so important for America to lodge itself in a country and culture which feels distinctly threatened by foreign invasion.

Watch the film not to understand America's middle-eastern policies. But to see how effectively a political drama can be created through characters who are placed in distinctly compromised positions where corruption isn't just a possibility, it's an inevitability.

Syriana stays uncorrupted .It doesn't judge the characters even when a nettled local in the Gulf pulls out George Clooney's nails.

Pain, you have to admit, is a close comrade of power. Syriana knows the mechanics of power play and uses them to brutal effect.