Thursday Minute
No. 115 | June 10, 2010

Derrick and the Dominoes

Our theme this week
Films about oil, and what it does to people

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Giant (1956)
Tuesday         —   The Wages of Fear (1953)
Wednesday    —   The Two Jakes (1990)

Syriana (2005)

Other films about oil this week are personal or local.  This one’s global.  Syriana is a political thriller spanning three continents and multiple storylines.

Oil here is not a diversionary MacGuffin, something just to get the action started, as you might see in a Bond movie.  It’s, as much as anything, the point of the movie:  oil is what makes the world go round.  It’s what everyone’s fighting for—the key to riches, the key to power, the key to control of the political chess board in the game that the master players are playing. 

The action is complicated, not easy to summarize, but what the film lacks in simplicity it makes up for in scope.  Big companies, a Washington law firm, the CIA, and a ruling family in an Arab monarchy are all in on the game.  In the geopolitics of the story, American interests are in jeopardy when a Mideast government grants rights to the Chinese, and the Americans do whatever they can to regain the advantage.  That includes an under-the-table deal to get government approval for a corporate merger and a plot to assassinate an Arab prince who hopes to reform his country’s repressive ways.

The film stars Matt Damon as a globetrotting financial analyst working for an energy company, George Clooney as a CIA officer stationed in the Mideast, Jeffrey Wright as a Washington attorney who makes things happen, Chris Cooper as the head of an oil company, and Alexander Siddig as the would-be reformer in the Gulf emirate.

I’ve seen criticism that Syriana is too far-fetched, the wild imaginings of conspiracy theorists.  The film certainly has a conspiratorial feel, as if pulling back the curtain to show us all how the world really works.  It is fiction, clearly, but is it inconceivable?  I don’t think you’d say so if you’ve been paying attention.

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Syriana (2005)
Stephen Gaghan, director

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Syriana (2005)
Jeffrey Wright, Tim Blake Nelson

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Quote of Note
Prince Nasir Al-Subaai:  What are they thinking, my brother and these American lawyers?
Bryan Woodman:  What are they thinking?  They’re thinking that it’s running out.  It’s running out, and ninety percent of what’s left is in the Middle East.  This is a fight to the death.
—Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig), Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), Syriana (2005)

…58…59…60.