Today, Redford’s hawks-vs.-doves allegory is stranger than fiction.
Esteemed TV-and-print journalist Janine Roth gets an exclusive one-hour interview with Illinois’s Senator Jasper Irving. The politician has summoned the favored reporter for a privileged audience, urging her to produce news coverage boosting his new strategy in the ongoing overseas war. Impressed by the senator’s blandishments, the egoistic journalist argues military strategy and then faces a moment of conscience. Afterward, she is pressured by her newsroom boss, who is eager for the scoop. They all know how important it is to win the hearts and minds of U.S. viewers through policy spin.
This remarkable interplay — scenes from the 2007 movie Lions for Lambs — outshines every American political movie of the past decade. Yet it has a stranger-than-fiction quality. They don’t make movies like this anymore.
Lions for Lambs, released one year before Obama’s election, was one of the last instances when a liberal Hollywood filmmaker like director-actor Robert Redford exercised skepticism about political authority. It was made when the legacy media excoriated George W. Bush, before he became a darling of commanding-heights media, which no one in Hollywood expected back then. Lions for Lambs opposed the Bush administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the weapons-of-mass-destruction bungle with such commitment that it was also the rare movie to criticize journalism.
Redford and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan devised a clever tripartite structure that parallels the former three branches of government: Here it’s the three branches of culture: Media (enacted by Meryl Streep’s reporter interviewing Tom Cruise’s pol); Politics (Derek Luke and Michael Pena portraying combat soldiers in Afghanistan); and Sentiment (Redford as the college professor who sent those young men to war but now teaches life-saving civics to Andrew Garfield, his brightest student). The Afghanistan premise was timely, representing Redford’s Sixties anti-war pacifism. Today, hawkish politicians and corporate media have made modern entanglements — Covid and the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine — unapproachable, inviolable movie subjects.
That’s why the collusion between reporter Janine Roth and Senator Jasper Irving feels like the heart of Lions for Lambs. It’s exactly like the relationship practiced between journalists and politicians in today’s cultural routine. As the Washingtonian’s Garret M. Graff observed on December 1, 2005: “Journalism is so firmly intertwined with government and politics and everything else that it’s nearly impossible to separate them. It is as firmly entrenched as any power structure in Washington.”
Roth’s questions to Irving are more skeptical than the set-ups we see in White House Press briefings, but Streep and Cruise put expressive faces on the robotic press-room participants that are no longer recognizably human — just insensitive power merchants.
Streep plays Roth as a bespectacled 58-year-old whose Mika Brzezinski hairstyle shows the desperation of a D.C. working woman. “You’re aware I’m doing a timeline on the War on Terror,” she excuses herself to the senator, whom Cruise plays as a charismatic, eager-beaver cynic. Cruise doesn’t have that befuddled, arrogant look of Blinken, Kirby, Milley, Sullivan, and other failed, inexperienced paper-tiger diplomat-warrior-sneaks. He represents “new-school military thinking.” Roth gets faked out by him when he says, “Let me state this as loudly as possible: I’m not running for president.”
Redford’s pretense in Lions for Lambs — as if the news bureaucracy distrusted government bureaucracy — comes from the same facile cynicism on display in Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and The Candidate, made back in the Seventies when he dreamed that the media were our savior. Now that’s a fantasy enjoyed by those already in power.
Still, the back-and-forth between Roth and Irving, though perhaps dated, triggers alarm: “When you say ‘nuclear,’ it sounds like . . . fearmongering.” Or ,“When you say ‘bait,’ it also sounds like Pentagonese.”
Their badinage is also fantasy, but it’s the closest we’ll probably ever get to the journalistic satire we need.
Irving counterpunches, “You guys had a heyday with Abu Ghraib; that was quite a meal ticket.” But he also cajoles Roth: “In a sense we’re on the same team. We’re teammates. We have everything we need to break the enemy right now except the public will to do it. That’s where you come in.”
Redford’s larger scheme probably did not include a media critique. He falls back on obsolete draft-era fear about “kids” being sent to war, even though today’s media elite no longer fears “the poor” being sent to war. Redford’s old-fashioned liberal sentimentality climaxes with Roth’s chagrin as she views D.C. monuments outside the window of her cab, slowing gliding past the Vietnam Memorial, the White House, and Arlington Cemetery. This quasi-patriotic sequence conveys the kind of regret we haven’t yet heard from the propagandists behind the Russian-collusion hoax or the January 6 show trials. It’s an unlikely display of shame for a journalist who knows she has the ability to propagandize the American public. (Streep’s remorseful reporter should be her most iconic role, reversing the authoritarian hagiography of her Katharine Graham characterization a decade later, in Spielberg’s The Post, from 2017.)
Lions for Lambs is especially worth revisiting after the eye-opening revelations of the Fox/Dominion connection and CNN’s failed effort to win Trump viewers that wound up changing the network. In the wake of these odious media machinations, there can be only willing naïveté among the populace. The lions/lambs/liars antagonism replaces the old battle between hawks and doves. Credit Lions for Lambs with reminding us that self-revelation has disappeared from our contemporary gaslighting culture, even though that’s what movie stars of Redford’s, Cruise’s, and Streep’s stature are supposed to do.