- Leonardo DiCaprio as Roger Ferris. Courtesy Warner Bros.
Body of Lies
MPAA rating: R for strong violence including some torture, and for language throughout.
Tempo grade: A-
Early on, Russell Crowe’s character, Ed Hoffman, a deeply entrenched veteran CIA spymaster, has a come-to-Jesus talk with some clueless politicos. He tells them that global terrorism is much more complex and dire than anyone has been led to believe, partly because we have deceived ourselves into thinking we hold all the cards. “Our world as we know it is much simpler … to put to an end than you might think,” he says.
We’re fighting a futuristic war using the most sophisticated surveillance and attack capabilities ever seen, right? But, if the enemy, who is indistinguishable from our allies, simply decides to not buy into modern technology — no e-mail, no cell phones, no credit cards — he essentially falls off the map, thereby making us the perfect target.
Ridley Scott’s new film is a brilliant examination of how this hard-core brand of warfare is being fought, and it is both a revelation and a real gut-churner because it rings so true. It is also one of his best films to date.
Perfectly titled, “Body of Lies” is based upon a novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Roger Ferris, a young CIA field agent working out of the Middle East to find intelligence on suspected Islamist mastermind Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul). Manipulating Ferris from afar, like a puppeteer pulling his strings, is his boss, Ed Hoffman (Crowe).
In several telling scenes, we see how the aforementioned delusion is illustrated as we watch Hoffman offhandedly advising and giving orders by cell phone to Ferris while eating a bowl of cereal in his suburban back yard or getting his kids ready for school. And in another, how the bad guys avoid high altitude surveillance by simply driving a group of cars around in circles creating a cloud of dust that masks the exit of a target vehicle, much like a street magician’s shell game.
But, these guys know that the only way they can draw Al-Saleem out of his comfort zone is to create a situation that offends his power-mad ego. So, Ferris concocts a plan to create a fictional al-Qaida group that takes responsibility for a faked bombing that instantly grabs the world’s headlines. To do this, Ferris must weave a web of lies that includes a favored ally in Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), Chief of Jordanian Intelligence, and a man who puts great stock in friendship and trust. In the meantime, Hoffman has his own agenda and is not above withholding information even from Ferris if somehow the desired effect is achieved.
Making Ferris’s work more complicated is a budding relationship with an Iranian nurse named Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani). In an otherwise well crafted and painstakingly authentic plot, this is the one element that seems a bit contrived. This film holds some similarities to his brother, Tony Scott’s “Spy Game” (2001), but instead of the CIA analyst in Washington acting as a benevolent mentor to his younger counterpart in the field, Crowe’s Hoffman is less ingenuous and more willing to cut him free if his sense of moral outrage gets the better of him. In that, we see how the modern world has become less a place for niceties to exist.
For those who may be squeamish, there are some grisly special effects that might be hard to watch.R for strong violence including some torture, and for language throughout.
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