Lions for Lambs
Directed by Robert Redford

Lions for Lambs, the new movie directed by and starring Robert Redford, is designed to move us away from the "black-and-white" rhetoric of the war on terror and instead draw our focus to the "gray areas." This is necessary so that there can be a debate on issues--a debate we have been "denied" over the past six years.

I know this because I heard Robert Redford say it before a screening of Lions for Lambs at the Museum of Modern Art, where the movie was met with rapturous applause by an audience studded with has-beens, including a Mohawk-sporting Randy Quaid, Andrew (Pretty in Pink) McCarthy, Adam (Counting Crows) Duritz, and Janine (Northern Exposure) Turner. Redford's main hope, he said just before his film unspooled itself over the course of 88 of the most barren minutes anyone has ever spent at MOMA, is that his new film will make us think. That is, indeed, a noble purpose. So let me say on behalf of the American filmgoing public that we collectively owe an inexpressible debt to Redford for deigning to slalom down from his pristine Utah mountaintop to compel us to make unaccustomed use of our underutilized gray matter.

Redford did not have to bestir himself, God knows. What more has he to prove? What more must he give to the nation and the world to whom he has given so much, particularly by jumping off a cliff shouting "S--t" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Well, the times demanded it of him, and Robert Redford has obeyed the urgent summons. It is Redford's view that his fellow Americans--or perhaps I should say his fellow Caucasian Americans, since the black and Latino characters in Lions for Lambs are nothing short of saintly in every respect--are at once so understandably disillusioned and so mind-numbingly materialistic that we simply choose not to cerebrate what should be celebrated.

Redford is sadly correct. Surely someone must be held accountable for the billions upon billions of American brain cells that were viciously and wantonly destroyed by the tragic decision, taken by far too many of Redford's countrymen, to spend two hours and six minutes watching his most recent outing as a director, The Legend of Bagger Vance. But believe me, these unfortunates were the lucky ones, as compared with others who were driven into a permanent state of drooling disrepair by the film Redford directed before Bagger Vance. I need not rehearse the details for the literate audience of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which is already well aware that Justice Anthony Kennedy, with his growing interest in the primacy of international law, recently declared even a voluntary viewing of Redford's The Horse Whisperer an unquestioned violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In a clear attempt to atone for his own unparalleled contribution to the growing idiocy of the American people, Redford has taken a didactic screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and harnessed Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise to it. And they, like he, pull and pull and pull at Lions for Lambs with desperate urgency and a crazed energy that is only produced by the most strenuous overacting.