Pure fence-sitting liberal agony is all that's on offer here, in a muddled and pompous film about America's war on terror, which seeks to counter neo-con belligerence with a mixture of injured sensitivity and a shrill, pre-emptive patriotism of its own. In fact, it gives liberalism such a bad name that on leaving the cinema, I felt like going out and getting a nude study of Norman Podhoretz tattooed on my inner thigh. How incredible that something as shallow and badly acted as this could be presented as a serious, even Oscar-worthy picture from Hollywood's finest.
Like many other films on this subject, it is in the ensemble-mosaic genre (Rendition, A Mighty Heart, Syriana), tensely intercutting between various scenes in various parts of the world, but here on a relatively unambitious scale, and with no characters from the Islamic world. Robert Redford directs, and plays a Californian political science professor, giving a gentle dressing-down to a student, Todd (Andrew Garfield), who has let his grades and his idealism slide.
Meanwhile, another earnestly talky, school-debate scene is unfolding in Washington DC. Tom Cruise plays the ambitious Republican senator Jasper Irving, who has deigned to give an interview to liberal TV journalist Janine Roth (Meryl Streep); he bullishly defends the WoT, yet graciously admits to "mistakes", and seductively offers Janine a top-secret exclusive on the government's latest plan to wrest back the initiative. And on the frozen and windswept field of battle in Afghanistan, we see two US special forces soldiers, Ernest (Michael Peña) and Arian (Derek Luke) encounter a desperate situation - and we learn how their fates are bound up with those of the other characters.
Until seeing this, I thought that the most condescending and toe-curling liberal response to 9/11 was the notorious special edition of TV's The West Wing, in which the characters self-importantly addressed a visiting group of schoolchildren on all the attendant issues - and effectively talked down to the audience in the same way. But Lions for Lambs is far worse: dull, inert, schoolteacherly, desperately self-conscious in its exposition of the issues - and with hogwhimperingly bad performances. Golden-haired Robert Redford, 71 years young, looks like some kind of animatronic model made out of wood, and whingey, snuffly Meryl Streep is supremely annoying. Tom Cruise, however, does deliver something like the right combination of sinister ideological commitment and flesh-pressing charm.
What is so infuriating is that Meryl Streep is playing a journalist - a journalist who apparently believes that the only respectable response to the Bush administration is impotent misery and career suicide. How indescribably pathetic of her. There were a dozen ways she could have got a critical story on the air, even on her cautious and conservative TV station. But this, perhaps, might mean Janine being exposed to criticism herself. The ending in Afghanistan has its own strange and unintentional gutlessness. The movie's title, incidentally, is taken from the apocryphal remark about first world war soldiers being incomparably finer than their incompetent commanding officers. According to Matthew Michael Carnahan's script, the phrase is "Lions led by lambs". The phrase is lions led by donkeys, surely? Donkeys are very much in charge here.