MIDWAY through one of the three narratives that twine through Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford’s hilariously awful drama about the War on Terror, Jasper Irving, an up-and-coming Republican senator played by Tom Cruise, steps out of his office to take a phone call. The journalist who’s been interviewing him, print-and-television veteran Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), rises and strolls around the room, taking in the various photographs adorning the walls: Irving with Dick Cheney, Irving with Condoleezza Rice, Irving with George W. Bush. The hawkish senator has spent the first half of the interview trying to sell Roth, a liberal who supported the invasion of Iraq and now bitterly regrets it, on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The battering-ram certainty of his rhetoric threatens to carry all before it, but the photos are mute reminders-to Roth, and to the audience-that when it comes to Republicans and military strategy, there are only four words that matter: Don’t get fooled again!
Or at least I assume that’s the effect that Redford was shooting for. I was thinking: What’s Tom Cruise doing with Dick Cheney?
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