Over the course of the last 12 years, since the Republicans took the house and senate in the 1994 elections and the United States entered the modern era of partisan politics, a new subset of films has begun popping up: message projects that seem more designed to raise the public’s awareness of a given topic or to get people talking than to actually entertain. See anything Michael Moore has ever done for an example of this; Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Big One are many things, but they aren’t what anyone would ever call technically sound filmmaking. Offering the audience an enjoyable and upbeat experience is not the same necessity for the directors of these message projects that it is for the grand majority of other filmmakers; they have another agenda in mind.

The first of these message projects to deliver anything in way of entertainment was director Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 investigation of the Mexican drug cartels, Traffic. Written by Stephen Gaghan, Traffic’s script was ambitiously broad, yet impressively compact. Though there were more than a twenty major characters, they were all three-dimensional and they all effortlessly made their way in and out of each other’s lives in a very believable, almost Seinfeld-ian fashion; this is why Gaghan won the Oscar for his typing on that project. Applying the same sense of intense research and sweeping examination of a singular issue from a number of different fronts, Gaghan has gone on to write and direct Syriana, an impressively structured examination inside the world of (cue ominous music) Big Oil.

A decidedly ensemble affair, Syriana has four concurrent storylines that, at times, cross one another. The major players are Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a CIA operative who specializes in Iranian intelligence, Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), an energy investor, Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), a corporate lawyer investigating the unusual merger between two oil companies and a disillusioned former oil worker who becomes infatuated with the more radical teachings of the Koran.

The multi-layer story structure of Syrianais, at once, the project’s greatest asset and its most limiting factor. On their own, it’s doubtful that any of the individual plot strands would support a feature film; Damon’s story seems slightly lacking as it is. Combined though, the four major branches make up a surprisingly comprehensive looking inside the oil world. Outside of a tongue-in-cheek look at a soccer mom complaining that her premium now costs more than $3 a gallon, it’s hard to fathom how Gaghan’s script for Syrianacould be more in-depth, probing and balanced.

However, the result of this sweeping look at the major players in the oil industry is that none of the notables are that particularly, well, notable. Clooney and Damon’s characters fare the best in terms of generating sympathy, but this is significantly more a product of the actor’s real world status as A-list Hollywood superstars than because their characters are more nuanced and well-defined.

Gaghan has done a magnificent job of calling attention to the greed and cutthroat nature of almost all those involved with oil and done so in a unique and surprisingly entertaining fashion. This is about as enjoyable as a project specifically designed to send a message can possibly be.

chris neumer

yes, it's true: The term 'syriana' is a governmental term that refers to the attempted shaping of the Middle East.