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Gladiator Meets Spy | Russell Crowe is a backseat driver for Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of Lies.

BODY OF LIES
Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong. Opens Oct. 10.
****

It’s difficult to pick out the bad guys in Body of Lies —not just ethically but visually as well. For a good portion of the film, director Ridley Scott just doesn’t let you know who Leonardo DiCaprio is after, because, after all, his character, CIA operative Roger Ferris, doesn’t really know either. Al-Qaeda grunts don’t tend to wear uniforms, or have a secret handshake that makes them easily identifiable. (Actually, maybe they do have a handshake ... I’m not sure.) Regardless, the effect of not being told who exactly DiCaprio has to kill to bring about his mission’s endgame is that it’s hard to tell how far in the story we’ve come, how much we have left to go, and when we get to pull out ... er, I mean, leave the theatre.

We do, however, know that the enemy is out there, building bombs and blowing away Europe’s tourist economy. Ferris, along with his boss and eyes at home, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), would prefer it if that stopped. To get to Terrorist Central, Ferris must talk to the henchmen — those who would normally be cannon fodder in a traditional action movie.

Near the beginning of the film, an Al-Qaeda operative, one who is not ready to die for the cause, is shaken loose. He has information to trade in exchange for asylum. Ferris agrees to the deal, but Hoffman isn’t willing to shelter a cowardly terrorist, and figures he should have thought about the consequences of signing up for martyrdom before he started running around yelling “jihad.” While Hoffman may have a point, Ferris is more forgiving. He sees a terrified man, a man who concedes that he made a mistake. Yet Ferris is forced to break his promise, sentencing the man to death by “cutting him loose.”

With that, the moral foundation of the movie is set: no one is innocent. If it’s difficult to pick out the bad guys here, it’s even more difficult to pick out the good guys.

The cast and the script of Body of Lies walk this moral tightrope with perfect balance. At the heart of Crowe’s Hoffman is a slightly overweight, grey-haired dad who is trying his best to make his suburban middle-class family safe. But, in so doing, he tosses out the values we would expect from a suburban middle class dad. Instead, he finds comfort in the warped idea that everyone is guilty of something. Ridley has Ferris yelling “motherfucker” into Hoffman’s handsfree headset as he helps his little girl get ready for school, gently reminding us that the lifestyle we are trying to protect is very different from the lifestyle required to protect it. It’s a subtle joke, but mostly you forget to laugh, considering the last scene probably involved watching someone being tortured or killed.

Perhaps Body of Lies’ only downfall is that it keeps you too tense for the impact of the various ethical and social statements it makes to completely sink in. From beginning to end, the audience stays focused on DiCaprio’s morally compromised hero getting out of the conflict alive. But maybe that’s the beauty of the film: that it shocks the audience enough to get us to stop thinking and hang on instead to a hero whose only heroic accomplishment, despite his best intentions, is his ability to survive.