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You are here: Home Life in News Focus Redford's inconvenient reckoning

09/11/2007Redford's inconvenient reckoning

Hollywood's senior liberal, Robert Redford, gets down to business on three fronts in his latest movie, the political drama Lions for Lambs.

As director, lead actor and producer, he racks up a long list of grievances in the film, the most political of the seven movies Redford has directed: the lust for power, war-mongering and incompetence in Washington, unmotivated students, uncritical journalists and the dumbing-down of US television.

The wordy drama about America's wars, its media and its youth plays out over three plots.

Redford himself plays a California sociology professor who challenges a smart but disillusioned student (Andrew Garfield) to action through a word duel.

In Washington, the film delivers a liberal television journalist (Meryl Streep) into the hands of a charismatic Republican senator (Tom Cruise.) The senator wants to wrap the skeptical but also ambitious reporter around his finger by giving an exclusive interview and winning her over as a mouthpiece for a new military strategy in Afghanistan.

 



At the same time two young Americans, a black (Derek Luke) and a Latino (Michael Pena), have volunteered to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban. While at home the fighting is verbal, the two front-line fighters come under real arms fire on a snow-covered mountain.

"What is Robert Redford's problem with America?" a conservative columnist with the cable television channel Fox News asked provocatively.

Redford shot back in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa: "That is the problem I got with it - I love it so much and I don't like to see what they are doing with it."

By "it" he means his country, and by "they" means the government in Washington and on this subject he does not mince words.

Cruise, in the role of a senator and friend of US President George W Bush, "comes from a very narrow singular point of view, which is basically the point of view that we have in the administration right now. It's very singular and ideological and you can't convince them any other way to think," Redford said.

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