The Hindu Business Line : <I>Syriana</I>: A slice of our times

Watch Syriana and you get the nagging feel that it was perhaps a close competitor to Crash, adjudged best film at the Oscars. Both make good use of parallel storytelling, except that Syriana makes the experience trying to give too many details in its plot.

Parallel storytelling involves multiple story lines hurtling their separate ways into the same vortex. The churn becomes a muddle when either the stories are too many or the few told have too many things for the viewer to remember and piece together at climax.

In Syriana, you feel the story's momentum but details — at least two story lines; that of CIA agent Bob Barnes (George Clooney) and Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), an attorney guiding the merger of two oil companies, are complicated — slow you down.

It probably shows; for the first time, you have a studio synopsis, which reads like a work in progress. Syriana's story rests on six pillars; each sub-plots in their own right. There is oil giant Connex that saw Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) grant its long held drilling rights to a higher Chinese bid and now sorely wants merger with Killen, a smaller company with attractive drilling rights won in Kazakhstan; there is Holiday doing due diligence on the Connex-Killen merger but who has to give the Justice Department dope against Killen for shady trades in the Kazakhstan deal; there is Nasir, a prince dreaming of reform but who loses his kingdom to his younger brother; there is energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) who believes in Nasir but has little idea of the politics in Nasir's life; there is the soon-to-retire Barnes who in his last assignment had lost a Stinger missile to a blue-eyed Egyptian and who on return is tasked with assassinating Nasir, an order rooted in oil politics; and finally, there are Connex's Pakistani workers, Saleem Ahmed Khan (Shahid Ahmed) and son, Wasim (Mazhar Munir), whose future turns bleak after the Chinese bid, nudging Wasim into a life in religious extremism and rendezvous with a blue-eyed Egyptian.

The story is a thriller weighed down on screen by mandatory legalese over the merger and the typically opaque workings of the CIA. Either the story or its constituents should have favoured simplicity to keep the narration tight and the pace, slick. In the end, Syriana fascinates as another Hollywood attempt to document our times but in the gap between itself and Crash betrays what excessive complexity does to storytelling.

It is otherwise a well-made film; tad jarring in its singsong Hindi dialogues (spoken by the Pakistani workers). The worlds of each protagonist are sharply delineated and the contrasts, made clear.

From that multi-tiered world with lives in separate orbits and converging at their own peril, the real hero is the genre of parallel storytelling. It captures well the current state of the world; the helplessness of people, their inability to see the whole and quite chillingly, as a very viewable slice of time with no pretence of judgment, leaves you wondering about the purpose of living. Increasingly, our lives are about nothing but staying alive. The film releases here on March 10. See it.