Despite the apathy of the wealthy
nations, including the United States, and the sporadic attention of the news
media, it apparently takes the film industry to recognize the deplorable
suffering of millions of people in Africa.
A number of recent movies, including
such varied titles as Tears of the Sun,
Beyond Borders, Hotel Rwanda, and The
Constant Gardener, suggest that whatever its motives, even Hollywood, that
much maligned entity, attempts to comprehend and publicize the contemporary
calamities of starvation, disease, and genocide that afflict the continent.
Now Lord of War tells yet another story of that ongoing tragedy, this
time in effect from the point of view of the bad guys.
Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, who
emigrated as a child from Ukraine with his parents, and like many immigrants,
dreams of greater possibilities than their restaurant in Brooklyn. His dream
leads him into arms dealing, a growth industry that allows him to start small,
as they say, peddling Uzis to local gangsters, and gradually expand into
international commerce on a grand scale. He eventually amasses a fortune by
wheeling and dealing in everything from submachine guns and hand grenades to
heavy artillery and armored personnel carriers.
In a practically continuous
voice-over, Cage narrates the entire film, recounting the history of his
professional and personal ascent, which the various scenes and sequences
illustrate in lively detail, and offering a series of pithy comments and useful
apothegms about the arms trade. Much of his commentary underlines the strange
ironies and even comic hypocrisies of his business and much of it, delivered in
his characteristic breathy, nasal whine, is incongruously funny.
Assisted by his brother Vitaly (Jared
Leto), as he progresses in his profession, Yuri takes advantage of the
apparently endless opportunities for running guns to a variety of customers,
most of whom operate in some dangerous arena outside the law. He sells weapons
to insurgents, rebels, and bandits in developing nations, to unstable and
illegal governments, mostly to vicious and unprincipled thugs who of course use
them to slaughter their enemies and maintain their power. Like an oil baron,
Yuri profits most when his territory undergoes the familiar difficulties of
chaos and bloodshed, which always drive up the demand for his product and consequently,
the price he can charge.
As Yuri travels the globe, buying and
selling his goods, he shows us just how difficult situations and violent
political transformations improve his business. He explodes into joy, for
example, when he hears the news of the collapse of the Soviet Union — he
knows the historic event means that huge quantities of military weaponry,
including tanks and artillery, will be available for sale, legally or
otherwise, and that dozens of former people’s republics, emerging nations, and
political groups will require arms to take control of their governments and
populations.
The longest and most important
sequences in the movie show Yuri’s frequent and profitable dealings with some
really bad people in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the major political
gestures mostly involve assassination and massacre and the soldiers routinely
practice rape and mutilation. Although he understands his complicity in these
acts, like any criminal Yuri rationalizes them with the usual excuses about simply
filling a need; more important, he also instructs the Interpol agent (Ethan
Hawke) pursuing him throughout the movie that he performs an important service,
selling weapons illegally where the United States, the largest dealer in the
world, cannot.
His weak voice and lugubrious
countenance notwithstanding, for a change Nicolas Cage delivers a generally
acceptable performance, even if everything he does remains on one emotional
level and lacks a good deal in the way of conviction. He pretty much looks and
acts the same whether about to be shot by a scary African warlord or about to
be made into a Cage sandwich by two beautiful women provided by the same
warlord.
Aside from its compelling and even
entertaining glimpse of the realities of international arms dealing and despite
its heavy spoken narrative, Lord of War works best in some terrific images, some of them as funny as they are
authentic.
The picture best summarizes its moral
vision in a brilliant opening sequence showing a single rifle bullet moving
from manufacture through shipping to placement in a clip to its firing, when
the camera follows it into the forehead of an African child soldier: That’s the
real meaning of the movie and the racket it exposes.
Lord of War (R), written and
directed by Andrew Niccol, is playing at Brockport Strand, Canandaigua
Theatres, Geneseo Theatres, Henrietta 18, Pittsford Cinema, Tinseltown USA
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
