'Beirut' a smart, stylish thriller set in chaos of Lebanon civil war
“Beirut” - ★ ★ ★
“Beirut,” a tense, stylish political thriller set in 1982 amid the chaos of Lebanon's civil war, stars Jon Hamm as a former U.S. diplomat who is called back to negotiate for the release of a CIA operative who has been taken hostage by one of the area's myriad factions.
Directed by Brad Anderson from a script by Tony Gilroy, “Beirut” bears the stamp of each filmmaker, propelled by Gilroy's knack for keeping a clear, coherent story in constant forward motion, and executed with Anderson's unfussy approach to visuals and character cues.
By the time Hamm's Mason Skiles is pulled back into duty, he has been working in the relatively sedate world of labor-management mediation in Boston. In those sequences, Hamm affects the sodden alcoholic dejection of Paul Newman in “The Verdict.” That same sense of benumbed fatalism follows him to the film's title city, where Christians, Muslims, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel and Syria — with America and the U.S.S.R. hovering in close range — are engaged in a heavily armed game of cat-and-mouse that has reduced a flourishing urban center to a wary, wrecked battleground.
Loosely based on the abduction of CIA station chief William Buckley by Hezbollah in 1984, “Beirut” never explicitly invokes the name of that then-emerging group. Rather, it plays like a prequel to the grievous events that would engulf the Middle East during that decade and beyond.
With the exception of Skiles, who continues to harbor frayed hope for deal making, very few players in “Beirut” are conventionally sympathetic — including the American Foreign Service lifers who haven't bothered to learn Arabic while embedding in the region. Their dismissive attitude is summed up in Skiles's description of Lebanon in an early sequence as a “boardinghouse without a landlord,” where the tenants are “bound only by their shared talent for betrayal.”
Some public-interest groups have already expressed outrage at “Beirut.” Among their complaints: that it was produced in Morocco, in large part because Lebanon has been rebuilt to the point that it can't credibly pass for a war zone; that it reduces Lebanese and Middle Eastern characters to stereotypes. Such films as “Waltz with Bashir” and “The Gatekeepers” (and, more recently, “Foxtrot” and “The Insult”) have sought to delve more thoughtfully into the contradictions that animated the civil war, and that still influence the region today. In “Beirut” those forces aren't the subject as much as a mutable, confounding backdrop for Hamm's character to redeem himself — and, by extension, the frequently misbegotten policies of the country he represents.
The inherent chauvinism of that premise notwithstanding, “Beirut” is an engaging, well-crafted thriller, offering a showcase not just for Hamm but for Rosamund Pike (playing his levelheaded handler) and an ensemble of terrific character actors, including Dean Norris, Shea Whigham and Larry Pine.
“Beirut” may be a mostly pessimistic portrait of its time and place, but it offers hope, if only that movies of its style and smarts can still get made.
• • •
Starring: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Other: A Bleecker Street release. Rated R for language, violence and nudity. 109 minutes