Recently, I posted about Baer's book, so heavily redacted by the CIA people, that the publisher decided to print it as is...redactions and all. Obviously, producer Gaghan bought the film rights early, because now it's already in film. Here, from Foxnews.com is the film story with new title:
Clooney’s New Movie: ‘Fahrenheit 411’
Saturday, November 19, 2005
By Roger Friedman
George Clooney
Syriana: Clooney’s CIA Movie Is ‘Fahrenheit 411’
Basically, in "Syriana," writer/director Stephen Gaghan (the Oscar-winning adapter of "Traffic"), former CIA agent Bob Baer, and producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have made a thriller for people who read The Financial Times. It’s also a companion piece in many ways to a great movie Clooney starred in several years ago, "Three Kings." Shot in Morocco and Dubai, "Syriana" may be an eye opener to westerners who don’t give much thought to world events.
Syriana was screened Friday night at Cinema 2, a sort of bunker movie theater in a basement, while upstairs in Cinema 1 Clooney’s "Good Night and Good Luck" was doing sold out business. Upstairs: the paying public. Downstairs: as much media elite as could fit in a room, with Robin and Marsha Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Mike Myers, Amy Irving, Nora Ephron, Jason Lewis, Catherine Crier and Lisa Bloom of Court TV, plus lots of editor/writer types and quite a few Academy voters.
ABC News chief David Westin moderated a panel after the screening with Clooney, Gaghan, and Baer fielding questions.
It was the first totally finished print, Gaghan told us, completed last Tuesday at 2:30pm. The last thing he did was pick the font for the closing credits. (It’s from a restaurant in Venice called Axe and pronounced ah-shay.) He started working on the film in 2001, and did a massive amount of travel and research with the help of former CIA agent Baer, upon whose book, "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," the movie is largely based.
In case you’re interested in this: the CIA has not seen the movie nor approved the script because Baer didn’t write it. They did vet his book, in which you will find many redacted pages with big, black markings covering sensitive material.
Syriana is a thriller but it can be a bit confusing. The basic story is that an oil company has set up shop in the Gulf, just as a merger is going through. The local royal Arab family is in the middle of a succession as the Emir (king) is about to step aside for one of his two sons: an idiot, and a sensitive, forward thinker. (Guess who gets the job.) Clooney plays a CIA agent who’s a little over the hill and washed up. But he’s onto the fact that the government and the oil companies are trying to stay in control through the manipulation of who becomes king.
There are murders and international intrigue, as well as two subplots. One involves Matt Damon as an American derivatives trader living in Geneva with his beautiful wife (Amanda Peet) and their two very cute little boys. The other is about two young Arab men looking for work and being courted by fringe terrorist groups. Damon is so good that he is likely to get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work. Of Clooney’s whole "Ocean’s 11" posse, Damon is easily the most talented.
"He’s it, the real thing," Clooney said when we talked about Damon.
Damon is a standout, but there are plenty of "smaller" roles played by terrific actors including Tom McCarthy, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, Mazhar Munir, Jeffrey Wright, Tim Blake Nelson (who has a funny speech explaining the historical importance of corruption) and the memorable Alexander Siddig (as the smart prince). Indeed, the actors are so uniformly good from the start that they all seem very real, as does the situation. This is ‘Fahrenheit 411’, meaning full of urgent information that rings true in every scene. Liberals and conservatives all have to put gas in their cars. One look at the prices, and you know that "Syriana" is not far off base.
Clooney was there with an unidentified blonde who sat in the back during the Q&A with a black hat pulled down to hide her face. He gained 30 pounds to play a fictionalized Bob Baer. On screen he looks and feels bloated, sporting a gray beard and effecting almost a waddle. His character is no joke, though. He’s Jack Lemmon from "The China Syndrome," a whistle blower who wakes up too late to realize his whole life has been a sham. It’s Clooney’s best and most coherent work on the big screen, and should get him a Best Actor nomination and lots of rave reviews.
Syriana is not always easy to follow. Sometimes I felt like I needed a study guide. But Gaghan has made such an engrossing film that you can actually suspend disbelief and just go with it. Once you’re in, you’re in, too. I don’t know if it will make money or be a Best Picture candidate, but Syriana is the most intelligent movie of 2005 so far, and incredibly satisfying.
One note though: I would change that poster and ad showing a blind-folded, bearded man. It’s a huge turn-off. It looks like a torture documentary or a prisoner of war saga. Warner Bros. would do well to sell Syriana as a thriller soap opera with intrigue, a la "Three Days of the Condor," and make sure to put Damon and Peet’s pictures in there with Clooney’s.
Clooney, you might like to know, also told me after the screening that the recent blow up he had in London was considerably different than the way it was portrayed in the British press and consequently, in our tabloids. "It was just a guy who was a jerk," he said of the photographer who cornered him in an alley. "I thought about hitting him, but I didn’t."
Wrap...
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