This was also true of Steven Soderbergh's drug saga, ''Traffic," which Gaghan wrote as well. ''Syriana," loosely based on former CIA agent Robert Baer's 2002 memoir ''See No Evil," assumes the same storytelling model as ''Traffic," only more ambitiously, with individual stories woven into a larger thesis. This new film also has a super-size wanderlust: The film is set in Geneva, the Persian Gulf, the Department of Justice, Texas ranches, the French Riviera, the Maryland suburbs, and Gaghan's unnamed Persian Gulf emirate.
The leadership of that country is yet to be determined. The current emir has two sons groomed to succeed him as king. One, Meshal (Akbar Kurtha), is a priss and a yes man. The other, Nasir (Alexander Saddig), is a more natural-born leader who's repulsed by his family's obeisance to America and its wishes for the country's natural gas. He wants to right his nation's squandered promise and be a reformer.
As a start, Nasir has just kicked out the Americans and handed over the drilling rights to a Chinese company, which leaves the previous drillers, a Houston outfit called Connex, in a fix. Connex decides it's going to merge with Killen, a smaller Texas oil company, which Connex finds attractive because it's about to start drilling for oil in Kazakhstan. Washington has to approve the merger, and to ensure that it goes smoothly the companies hire an intimidating D.C. law firm to find and fix any potential roadblocks. The job falls to a taciturn lawyer named Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright). We're told what Bennett might be capable of when Christopher Plummer, haughty as ever playing Bennett's boss, says that he might be a lion who's been mistaken for a lamb.
''Syriana" is big on lambs, ideally of the sacrificial sort -- even when they look like teddy bears, as a tubby and grizzled George Clooney does. He plays Bob Barnes, a loyal veteran CIA agent whose latest assignment involves arranging a pivotal assassination.
