Dumbed-Down Visuals

“Ibsen with helicopters” is how one US critic described Lions with Lambs. It was of course intended as a putdown. According to SMH reviewer Paul Byrnes, “the snarling blogs of war have been busily denouncing Lions for Lambs well before it opened”. But it does raise an important issue. Is film the appropriate medium for an exploration of ideas—be they political or philosophical? For me the answer is yes. I love movies like Judgment at Nuremberg, the first Pygmalion and both film versions of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. In all those films the visual was integrated into the drama and they were in fact cinematic—literary cinema to be sure, but why not.

The same can be said of Lions for Lambs. The script by Matthew Michael Carnahan cuts between three separate stories—the action taking place simultaneously in close to real time. At an unnamed Californian university Political Science Professor Stephen Malley (Robert Redford, who also directs) confronts a talented but…