Salt Lake Tribune Review

Director/star Robert Redford's ripped-from-the-headlines political drama Lions for Lambs feels like a really good off-Broadway play - stripped of artifice, its sharp commentary to the point, making its stinging points more through words than action.
The story is split in thirds, each happening at the same time.
* In Washington, D.C., fast-rising Republican Sen. Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) is offering an unusually candid interview to a veteran TV reporter, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), giving her the scoop on a new military offensive in Afghanistan.
* At an unnamed university in California, Prof. Stephen Malley (played by Redford) is meeting with Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), a cynical student who the teacher believes can be motivated toward political awareness - and he uses the case of two former students, Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Pea) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke), as inspiration.
* And somewhere in Afghanistan, Rodriguez and Finch, now soldiers in the U.S. Army, are pinned down in a firefight during the offensive Irving is hawking to Roth.
Two sets of these dialogues - between Irving and Roth, and between Malley and Hayes - are like chamber pieces, two characters talking across a desk (though Malley's description of his students is augmented with flashbacks). Within those dialogues are biting comments about the mishandling of the war in Iraq, the flag-waving complicity of political parties and the media, the bread-and-circuses distractions of celebrity news and reality TV, and the jaded-beyond-their-years apathy of young voters.
(One group immune from criticism: the troops. The movie's title references a quote from a German officer in World War I, who lauded British soldiers' courage while decrying their commanders' stupidity: Nowhere have I seen such lions led by such lambs. Parallels to today's U.S. military and the civilian leadership who never served in combat are unmistakable.)
Lions for Lambs feels as if screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan included all the topical stuff excised from his last movie, The Kingdom, which began as a political drama and took the safe route to become a standard action thriller. This time, the raw, unapologetic politics provide their own thrills.
Some thrills are provided by the performances. The highlight is the clash of the titans between Cruise, as the ambitious but tightly wound neo-con, and Streep, finding grace notes of doubt and maternal worry amid the foreign-policy skepticism.
But the most thrilling thing about Lions for Lambs is the way Carnahan's script - or perhaps it's our perilous times - has energized Redford to jump fully back into the political ring, something he's been wary of doing in film since the '70s trifecta of The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men. In his soulful performance as the aged mentor (only a step removed from his job advising young filmmakers at the Sundance Institute) and in his hard-hitting but fair-minded direction, Redford isn't urging audiences to think in one particular way. He is urging them to think - which is a political act in itself.
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* SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

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