But it could have happened anytime in the last 35 years, going back into Beirut. Scott added, “the film is about their dance of seduction, betrayal, deceit, and layers and levels of it. “Isn’t that everything? And that’s just this week.” Occasionally they feature situations in which perception is amorphous and good intentions are thwarted. Crowe (“Gladiator,” “A Good Year” and “American Gangster”) often involve landscapes in which the director’s visual virtuosity can be exercised. Scott, whose films which include “Blade Runner,” “Black Hawk Down” and three movies with Mr. But the subject of “Body of Lies” seems custom-made for Mr. Whether audiences will be drawn to him is another story. One of those guys who manages to rise and rise while never actually accomplishing anything. You can put him anywhere you like executive, editor, your boss down at the sewer department. “He really is: Hoffman, the American bureaucrat who never does anything right and never gets punished for it. “Hoffman is really an American archetype,” Mr. François Duhamel/Warner Brothers Pictures Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of ∻ody of Lies. The results of just such a gamble will be determined beginning Friday, when Warner Brothers releases Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies.” With Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio interpreting a script by William Monahan (“The Departed”), “Body of Lies” puts on prominent display deceptions, betrayals and dispensable attitudes toward humanity that might be essential to United States intelligence work overseas, but that seem particularly challenging at a time when studios appear happy to mollify audiences with hormone-based comedies and superhero epics. The one bona fide hit with a link to the Mideast has been the stoner comedy “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.”īut what if you gathered two of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated directors, an Oscar-winning screenwriter and a novel and threw them all at the seemingly intractable craziness of the Middle East? Films like “Rendition” and “Redacted” have floundered at the box office, as have movies only tangentially linked to the conflict (like “The Kite Runner,” set in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan).
That American moviegoers are allergic to matters revolving around Iraq and the war on terror has become a pillar of wisdom. TO paraphrase the old Vietnam-era bumper sticker: What if they gave a war movie and nobody came?