Stick to what you do best, Andrew

Rating: 5/10 (14 August 2007)

Andrew Niccol is the greatest screenwriter of our generation. He thinks deeply, writes intelligently, and is blessed with an incredibly fertile imagination. Above all he has passion and isn't afraid to show it, when most writers today hide their real feelings, if they have any, behind cute, cynical inanities. When his screenplays end up in the hands of good directors, like Weir in The Truman Show or Spielberg in The Terminal, the result is a masterpiece. But, regrettably, Niccol feels driven to be a director himself, a trade for which he has no talent at all. In 2002's Simone, his hand on the helm hobbled his own brilliant script, reducing a potential all-time classic to an ordinary good movie. And now, directing his own script again for Lord of War, Niccol falls flat on his face.
The story: If you've got money, Yuri Orlov can sell you guns. Or tanks, or helicopters, or whatever weapons you need. It's his job, and he's good at it. He sells African dictators the weapons they use to slaughter their own people. He sells arms to terrorists for their mass murder jobs (though not to Osama bin Laden, who is always bouncing checks). For some reason, although he will sell guns to anyone, good people never end up buying his wares. He uses his blood money to buy a beautiful wife, a nice home, and to support his drug-addicted brother Vitaly. The development of the plot is essentially a moral version of the Limbo: how low can Yuri go?
This is not one of Niccol's best scripts. It suffers badly from the worst kind of political naiveté, the kind that imagines itself to be sophisticated, making profound insights like "somebody makes money off guns," while cluelessly confusing Liberia's HIV+ rate with Zimbabwe's, attributing non-existent arrest powers to Interpol, and equating the single misguided Bush v. Gore decision to the rampant every-election cheating of a Third World despotism.
But the script still had potential to be good, as it studies Yuri's growing self-loathing, and his suspicion that his brother Vitaly's worthlessness stems from his shame for Yuri's way of life and his own failure to do anything about it. The best and most tragic scene, where Vitaly finally does take action both to stop and to save his brother Yuri, represents what the movie could have achieved. A better director than Niccol would have focused on these character-driven moments and ditched the naive political nonsense.
But alas, thanks to Niccol's directing, character languishes in the background while sloppy political thinking stands is spotlighted. The essential problem is that nobody in the movie, Yuri least of all, honestly examines gun-running as a profession. Yuri tries once to justify himself by saying that he sells people the tools they need to defend themselves. In Yuri's case, that happens not to be true. His clients, or at least the ones we are shown, use their new-bought weapons to massacre political opponents, wipe out ethnic minorities, and otherwise commit mass murder, not for self-defense. But the movie never addresses the fact that lack of guns, and the arms embargoes that Agent Valentine castigates Yuri for violating, also can facilitate mass murder. For a famous recent example, an international arms embargo against Yugoslavia in the 1990s left Bosnian Muslims and Croats defenseless against Serbian nationalists bent on genocide, and the resulting carnage went on for years before the international community decided to do anything about it. Yuri's sin is his choice of customers, not his choice of merchandise.
This basic error percolates. As the movie points out, private gun suppliers like Yuri are small potatoes on the world stage. The five members of the UN Security Council sell far more weapons than all the world's private dealers combined. What is not addressed is whether these nations behave like Yuri, arming any murderous psychotic with ready cash, or whether they can legitimately say that they are helping people defend themselves. It is again simply taken for granted that all arms dealing is evil.
The movie loses the opportunity to examine the ethics of arms dealing through the underused character of Simeon Weisz. Weisz has some kind of ideological basis for his arms dealing, but it's not clear what it is. Weisz believes that "Bullets change governments far surer than votes"  an absurd claim, as in fact challenger candidates win far more often than armed rebels do. Eventually Weisz ends up selling guns to the enemies of Baptiste, the African dictator that Yuri is arming (or I think he does, anyway; Baptiste denies it but is probably lying). But there is no clue whether Weisz has chosen to arm Baptiste's enemies because he is morally opposed to Baptiste's brutal rule, or merely because Yuri has beaten him to Baptiste's pocketbook.
However, Niccol's direction has other flaws than self-indulgent and sloppy political moralizing. He has also taken an above-average actor, Nicolas Cage, and wrung a bad performance out of him. Cage is monotonous and shallow, with none of his trademark appealing vulnerability. I blame Niccol not only because Cage is normally better than this, but because the supporting players who get less directorial attention are mostly doing good jobs. Eammon Walker is commendable as the ruthless Andre Baptiste, Sr., and Ethan Hawke projects considerable frustration in the role of Agent Valentine. I feel his pain, for this movie is an intensely frustrating experience, despite occasional flashes of character insight.
Rating: ** out of ****.
Recommendation: TV fare for a VERY slow night.