by MARK SLUTSKY

Texas oil wildcatters, Saudi princes, Washington lobbyists, Swiss financiers, Kazakhstani politicians, Hezbollah, suicide bombers, attorneys, CIA agents, SUVs, migrant workers, Stinger missiles, birthday parties gone terribly wrong... all of these and more are the essential elements of Syriana, a new movie from writer/director Stephen Gaghan. Weaving these connections between politics, the Middle East, money, oil, war and terrorism is a fascinating and arguably even necessary task right now. But does that make for a good movie? For the most part, yes.

Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, and his style is evident here. Though Syriana doesn’t deal with the war on drugs, its ensemble-cast, jigsaw-puzzle, everything-happening-all-at-once approach, does feel a little like Traffic 2: Back in the Habit. (While Traffic did have some pretty major problems, it’s probably better that Syriana resemble that movie than Gaghan’s directorial debut, the portentous Montreal-shot thriller Abandon.) And despite Syriana having flaws of its own, in some ways it really surpasses Soderbergh’s film—no moving, emotional speeches or colour-coded stylistic gimcrackery here.

Let’s meet the movie’s big, excellent cast. A bearded, noticeably heavier George Clooney plays CIA agent Bob Barnes, a long-time man in the field now slated for a desk job. Jeffrey Wright is lawyer Bennett Holiday. He’s investigating an oil deal between an American company and Kazakhstan—a deal that led to a merger with a much larger corporation. Matt Damon is an American energy analyst in Switzerland, who, after a swimming-pool accident, gets caught up in the reform ideas of Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), heir to the throne of an unnamed Gulf state that’s probably meant to be Saudi Arabia, and which recently gave the rights to its oil to China, much to the dismay of the aforementioned American oil concern. Mazhar Munir is Wasim Khan, a Pakistani national and migrant worker left jobless and stateless in Prince Nasir’s country, and who eventually turns to the teachings of radical clerics in his frustration. Gaghan darts back and forth between all of these people, countries, and companies, showing the connections between them with varying degrees of success.

Syriana is a complicated movie and by the end it seems to all come together, although you may, while mulling it over, start to find lingering problems and unexplained loose ends. Since Gaghan is dealing with a lot here—a lot of issues, a lot of actors, a lot of plot—there are times when he simply stretches it all too thin. This complexity also, to a certain extent, comes at the price of character; there’s simply no time to get into everybody’s heads, for better or for worse.

That said, you won’t find too many casts better than this outside of a Soderbergh or Woody Allen movie these days, and it’s a treat to watch them all do their thing. And more than that, tackling these issues in the public sphere couldn’t really be more important these days—Gaghan might be overreaching but it’s good that he’s reaching at all.

Syriana opens Friday, Dec 9

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