Tony Gilroy's latest political thriller (if that's even the right genre label) centers on the cultural intersection of Beirut. The story starts in 1972, where the US diplomat Skiles (Jon Hamm) lives a liberal socialite life of wealth and influence. His foster son Karim, a Lebanese boy, becomes the target of an international intelligence effort to find his brother, a terrorist in the Munich Olympics massacre.
Ten years later, Skiles, now an alcoholic widower and corporate negotiator in America, is summoned to Beirut for a mysterious purpose, ostensibly to teach a seminar. Suspicious but compelled to go, he returns to the war-torn rubble of his former home. As he attempts to piece together his purpose there, he meets a strike team (including "the skirt" Rosamund Pike and a hairy, spectacled Dean Norris) who informs him that his former CIA friend was abducted and his kidnappers have requested Skiles to negotiate.
For someone -- like me -- who doesn't know the history of wars and politics and religious strife of the Middle East, Gilroy's screenplay leaves a little to be desired. Names and titles and dates and allegiances are tossed around with abandon and we're meant, I think, to follow it all. But the mazelike construction of the script, while fascinating, don't add as much tension to laypeople's experience viewing. On the other hand, director Brad Anderson does some fine work making the film still palatable and navigable; I was never totally lost in the drama.
Hamm is endlessly watchable as a leading man, sweating and drinking and brooding but always looking fabulous. He's a star who always keeps me guessing, and this is the first time I've seen him perform in a way that isn't all about him. He feeds from his fellow actors, and he listens to them in ways that could be taught in an acting masterclass. We can see his wheels turning, and it doesn't take long to see that his character is an exceptionally skilled negotiator. His double-speak and ballsy turns of phrases are almost as riveting as the earnest power behind his voice.
Besides Hamm, the film is a fairly run-of-the-mill procedural thriller with elements of espionage and war tossed in. While with a title like Beirut I might have wished for larger scale and a more fully-told story, something more like Munich. But Anderson is no Spielberg. What we get is something a little less polished and haunting than Detroit, a sort of microcosm of a larger world, a big story told in a surprisingly intimate way. Beirut is, ultimately, a dizzying moral compass in which no character is unblemished and cruelty and vice abound in the violence of our world. The final sequence of the film features flashes of news reports of what comes after the plot has ended, revealing that the film is more or less the quiet between storms: the civil war may have been bad, but horrors are still to come.
IMDb: Beirut
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