At times the film that Paul Brickman's brilliant screenplay for Deal of the Century promised, Aussie futurist Andrew Niccol crafts with Lord of War a sometimes transcendent, sometimes finger-wagging fable about a ridiculously successful gunrunner, Yuri (Nicolas Cage), prowling the hot spots of the Third World like a vampire in trenchcoat and shades. (I'm not convinced it wasn't the effect Niccol was going for, what with the obvious connection between spreading pestilence and feeding on death--and, of course, what with Cage's best role arguably being the quasi-vampire in Vampire's Kiss.) Without much of a narrative, even subplots concerning Yuri's mad, druggie brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) and model wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan) seem like way-stations along a dotted line. Too often, the picture lives and dies on its ability to keep the pace fluid--but just that need for momentum suggests something amiss at the heart of the piece, a certain surface tension that would pop should the rock-star protagonist we envy ever collide against the satire of the kind of colossal moral vacuity required of his vocation. It's the embedded problem of what Hitchcock observed as a character we like because he does his job well: what if that job is essentially reprehensible and, moreover, what if the ultimate desire of the film is that we experience righteous repugnance?

Another rebuke of slipshod foreign policies based on capitalism and empire-building on the backs of desperate African nations, Lord of War joins films from this year like The Constant Gardener and The Interpreter. (Although it's better than both, resisting as it does the urge to make a romance its core and its politics a MacGuffin, it's crippled all the same by this desire to be admired.) I think of Niccol (S1mOne, Gattaca, The Truman Show) as a romantic, a throwback to the era of classic science-fiction where the limitless possibilities of Man were the subject, not, as is the case with so much modern science-fiction, his limitations. The tragedies used to be of Icarean ambition rather than of Oedipal introspection, and so while Lord of War, at least on the surface, appears to be the story of the rise and fall of king capitalist draped in his slick amorality, it decides by the end to be a solipsistic detective story: Oedipus solving the riddle of the king's murder to find that it's all of us. It's a point-of-view that feels especially naïve given the lengths to which Niccol goes to make Lord of War a scathing indictment of the way men rationalize away the evisceration of their better selves in the pursuit of trophy wives, Hyde Park penthouses, and borrowed ethnic identity.

The best scene involves a stripping of a downed cargo plane filmed in the kind of time-lapse generally reserved for beetles stripping a cadaver. It's fascinating for the hint of the biomechanical in its execution--a visual commentary (if only the film were free of omnipresent narration) on the essential, non-intelligent design of desperation and the insidious proliferation of ideology and technology that bespeaks an eloquence of which the rest of the picture's ham-hands prove incapable. Niccol is a very fine visual filmmaker, but he distrusts this strength, relying instead on over-scripting of the "in case you didn't catch it" variety. Case in point: the exchanges between world-weary, snake-oil sleazy Yuri and straight-arrow fed Valentine (Ethan Hawke), which, in their carefully-manufactured, infantile manner, are cozy in the way that adolescent exchanges between authority figures and rebels tend to be. The issue of the essential folly of industrialized nations supplying insurgencies deserves a more critical look (where, for instance, did the Iraqi insurgency get their weaponry? Where, for another instance, did the Japanese get the steel with which to bomb Pearl Harbor?). As it is, Yuri is less an antihero than just a hero, and the picture is less a cautionary satire than another warning come too little, too late. Lord of War is a trippy, high-budget public service announcement shot like a luxury car commercial and narrated by an A-lister with a liberal agenda but not enough artistic integrity to portray a person he despises as genuinely despicable. The problem isn't that it's controversial, but that it isn't controversial at all; pity that Lord of War is actually a pretty fair representation of the current state of America's Democratic platform: flaccid, conciliatory, and AWOL.-Walter Chaw

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the critic

Published: September 16, 2005