Movie review: Body of Lies

Smitten and bitten: Leonardo's curse.

by John P. Meyer

When you peel back the dense onionskin layers of intrigue that make up Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, at its core you discover a clash between two schools of espionage. One relies on big-money high-tech surveillance gear, while the other posits that human assets - hearts and minds (and blood and guts) on the ground - trump technology every time. In literary and philosophical terms, it's Tom Clancy vs. John le Carré; or in this instance screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) working from a novel by David Ignatius.

This is not to say that CIA spymaster Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe, appearing pudgy and domestic, as befits the role) doesn't employ ground assets to get his dirty work done - it's just that he spends most of his time viewing them from the vantage point of a reconnaissance drone parked in circling orbit 80,000 feet overhead. Lending them - in Ed's view - all the humanity of trained fleas.

Ed's ground-level lead operative is Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), whom he addresses familiarly as "Buddy." It's Ferris' job to get down and dirty with locals both friendly and antagonistic - and often the distinctions are subtle (or entirely obscured). Ferris recruits his own local agents, and thanks to Ed's rough handling (in terms of tactics) these unfortunates are hung out to dry more often than a bedwetter's mattress pad.

The focus of current espionage operations is a bin Laden-type character known as Al-Saleem (played with sinister resolve by Alon Abutbul), known as "White Whale" in coded missives. Al-Saleem is coordinating the activities of a network of suicide bombers around the globe, with most of their current attacks being unleashed in Europe.

Al-Saleem's crew have mostly succeeded in evading the scrutiny of Ed and his high-tech surveillance teams by going EM-silent: they've discontinued use of cell phones and other modern communications devices in favor of - we suppose - direct personal messengers and perhaps even (*GASP!*) snail-mail. Thanks to Ferris' recovery of some incompletely-burned data disks from a remote Iraqi desert safehouse (obtained at high human cost), the CIA develops a lead on "White Whale" in Jordan.

It's here (in Amman) where things get really interesting for Ferris. And (even more) complicated.

Operating under the paternal eye of debonair and deadly Jordanian intelligence agency head Hani (Mark Strong, channeling Andy Garcia), Ferris puts together an operation to penetrate Al-Saleem's organization. In the course of correcting a mistake brought about by one of Hoffman's clandestine (and clumsily orchestrated) side-missions, Ferris gets bitten by a really mean Jordanian dog, sending him to a local clinic. There he meets a nurse named Aisha (charming Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani) and finds himself smitten. Apparently, Aisha gives good rabies shots, because Ferris goes out of his way to revisit her clinic for his weekly boosters. Eventually, he starts seeing her outside the office, leading to an uncomfortable (but amusing) dinner conversation with her sister and nephews.

Working in Hani's bailiwick proves particularly challenging for Ferris, because that gentleman - unlike Ferris' absentee boss, Ed - assumes that a man's word is his bond. Ferris is expected to share operational intel with his Jordanian host, which of course proves all the more problematic because he himself is not privy to all of it. (Damn that Ed and his backup plans!) Having visited Hani Pasha's detention facility - as an observer, thankfully - Ferris has been made eloquently aware of Hani's less-than-humanitarian approach to prisoner treatment. (Waterboarding might be a pleasant change of pace for these detainees.)

In the film's climactic confrontation, Ferris must dance to Al-Saleem's brutal tune in order to have a chance at saving someone he cares about; for a man who has left so many others to their miserable fates, it feels like the road to redemption.

Body of Lies succeeds as an action thriller on the basis of its masterful direction, nail-biting pacing and expert cinematography (thanks to Alexander Witt, who also worked with Scott on American Gangster). We get a heady feel for the fast-and-loose operational protocols of the Middle East, particularly in Iraq where Ferris wields his pipsqueak Skorpion machine pistol with almost supernatural aplomb against antagonists armed with more formidable AKs. Bombs explode almost on top of us. As characters run from raining shrapnel and chattering gunfire, the camera comes off its pedestal, providing enough operational freedom to give us a feeling of motion without making us sick to our stomachs. (Thanks, Steadicam.)

The characters are idiosyncratic and finely drawn. Ed Hoffman spends most of his waking hours (in a bathrobe watering his suburban lawn; in the car driving his kids home from school) with a hands-free cellphone headset dangling from his ear - and it's the wired kind, no Bluetooth for this guy. Following an explosion that kills his partner - seated next to him at the time - Ferris keeps a matchbox in his pocket to deposit the bone fragments he periodically plucks from his arm: they're pieces of his friend, kind of like mementos.

Simon McBurney has a juicy cameo role as a freelance spymaster who operates out of his fern-laden home office, where he indulges in a range of fresh fruits while monitoring a bank of CIA-accessing video displays and clicking away at his keyboard. ("The strawberries are great!")