Calling Senator Cruise

...In a clear attempt to atone for his own unparalleled contribution to the growing idiocy of the American people, Redford has taken a didactic screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and harnessed Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise to it...

...He begged them not to go...

...But they decided they had to get involved in order to further their cause of bringing social justice to the ghetto—to join the military and fi ght in the war on terror to give them unimpeachable political credentials...

...I need not rehearse the details for the literate audience of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which is already well aware that Justice Anthony Kennedy, with his growing interest in the primacy of international law, recently declared even a voluntary viewing of Redford’s The Horse Whisperer an unquestioned violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention...

...So let me say on behalf of the American fi lmgoing public that we collectively owe an inexpressible debt to Redford for deigning to slalom down from his pristine Utah mountaintop to compel us to make unaccustomed use of our underutilized gray matter...

...noble purpose...

...Redford’s main hope, he said just before his fi lm unspooled itself over the course of 88 of the most barren minutes anyone has ever spent at MOMA, is that his new fi lm will make us think...

...Creighton Abrams—and besides, people like Cruise lied us into war in Iraq...

...Will he do it...

...What more has he to prove...

...Redford sees in Unmotivated the same bravery, the same conviction, the same ability to stand up for something...

...And they, like he, pull and pull and pull at Lions for Lambs with desperate urgency and a crazed energy that is only produced by the most strenuous overacting...

...After Cruise gets a phone call informing him that the new strategy is already a failure because Redford’s two students are bleeding on the mountain, he turns to her and speaks the truth...

...The movie basically consists of three one-act plays, with two characters each, taking place simultaneously: Cruise and Streep in the Senate offi ce, Redford and Unmotivated Student in a campus offi ce, and Redford’s two students shot up and bleeding on an Afghan mountain while al Qaeda operatives close in on them...

...He is tired of America being humiliated, he says...

...We are left to understand that the only thing standing between America and Armageddon at the hands of Tom Cruise, Evil Republican, is the Unmotivated College Student choosing to “stand up for something...

...Never before have we seen such shades of gray...

...Surely someone must be held accountable for the billions upon billions of American brain cells that were viciously and wantonly destroyed by the tragic decision, taken by far too many of Redford’s countrymen, to spend two hours and six minutes watching his most recent outing as a director, The Legend of Bagger Vance...

...Redford is sadly correct...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Lions for Lambs, the new movie directed by and starring Robert Redford, is designed to move us away from the “black-and-white” rhetoric of the war on terror and instead draw our focus to the “gray areas...

...This is necessary so that there can be a debate on issues—a debate we have been “denied” over the past six years...

...Redford tells Unmotivated the story of his two students, little knowing they are meeting their fate at that very moment...

...The last thing we see is Unmotivated reading the crawl on Streep’s cable news channel simply stating that there is a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan...

...She is old enough to have heard it all before, she says, in the language of Vietnam-era Gen...

...What more must he give to the nation and the world to whom he has given so much, particularly by jumping off a cliff shouting “S—t” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

...Two of the Special Forces troops are former students of liberal professor Redford, who is in his offi ce having a sit-down with an impressive but unmotivated college student...

...Do something,” Redford tells Unmotivated, who replies that politicians tell lies and why shouldn’t he just go for the good life where you make money...

...Cruise, who looks far more like John Edwards than any Republican politician, offers plastic platitudes to Streep...

...And there you have Lions for Lambs...

...She says she will not be a vehicle for warmongering propaganda the way the entire news media were the last time...

...She arrives at the Capitol Hill offi ce of Republican Senator Cruise, who has a scoop for her: There is a new strategy to win the war in Afghanistan...

...She hangs her head in shame...

...She leaves his offi ce, begins to hyperventilate, and tells her boss that Cruise is going to become the next president and use nuclear weapons on unsuspecting Muslims...

...But this is a Hollywood picture, and we know that Hollywood is far too monastic a place to abide anyone who is just in it for the money...

...Because that is what it is all about— standing up for something...

...Mistakes were made in the past, he says, but now is the time to look forward...

...I know this because I heard Robert Redford say it before a screening of Lions for Lambs at the Museum of Modern Art, where the movie was met with rapturous applause by an audience studded with has-beens, including a Mohawk-sporting Randy Quaid, Andrew (Pretty in Pink) McCarthy, Adam (Counting Crows) Duritz, and Janine (Northern Exposure) Turner...

...But believe me, these unfortunates were the lucky ones, as compared with others who were driven into a permanent state of drooling disrepair by the fi lm Redford directed before Bagger Vance...

...Streep has given in...

...Well, the times demanded it of him, and Robert Redford has obeyed the urgent summons...

...Thank the Lord, we have at last moved past the black-and-white rhetoric of the past six years...

...It is Redford’s view that his fellow Americans—or perhaps I should say his fellow Caucasian Americans, since the black and Latino characters in Lions for Lambs are nothing short of saintly in every respect—are at once so understandably disillusioned and so mind-numbingly materialistic that we simply choose not to cerebrate what should be celebrated...

...That is, indeed, a John Podhoretz, movie critic for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editorial director of Commentary...

...He points out that her network used to offer serious news reporting and now has a toothy anchorwoman with big hair...

...At that very moment in Afghanistan, Special Forces troops are being moved into position to implement Cruise’s new strategy...

...Her boss tells her to write up the news without mentioning the whole nuclear-weapons thing...

...Streep plays a reporter for a news network who also doubles as a correspondent for Time in her copious spare time...

...He says she’d better, or Streep’s sick mother will no longer be able to receive 24-hour care...

...Redford did not have to bestir himself, God knows...