Beirut

As you know, I’m a big fan of old-fashioned spy films that focus on intelligent drama instead of action. For the most part, Beirut qualifies. And yet, something didn’t feel quite right.

Directed by Brad Anderson and written by Tony Gilroy (back in 1982), Beirut stars Jon Hamm as Mason Skiles, a former U.S. diplomat in Beirut who is called into service by the CIA when his old friend, Cal Riley (Mark Pellegrino), is kidnapped during the Lebanese Civil War in 1982. Rosamund Pike plays Sandy Crowder, the undercover CIA agent in charge of keeping Skiles safe in Beirut. The rest of the team trying to negotiate Riley’s release before he is forced to reveal all his secrets includes three state department officials: Donald Gaines (Dean Norris), Gary Ruzak (Shea Wigwam) and Frank Shalen (Larry Pine).

Skiles lost his wife in a terrorist attack in 1972 and has become a serious alcoholic. He really doesn’t want to be in Beirut and has no interest in playing by any rules. But he’s a master negotiator and poker player and the kidnappers have specifically asked for him to handle the ransom demands. Everyone thinks that this is because of his friendship with Riley but that turns out not to be the case. I won’t say more, other than that Israel’s Mossad plays a key role in the ransom negotiations.

The trailer for Beirut was viciously attacked by journalists for making the film look like another Hollywood film that stereotypes all Arabs/Muslims as uncivilized terrorists and has a white American saviour. This might have been a fair critique of the trailer, but it doesn’t do justice to the film, which is fairly nuanced, politically, and tries at least a little to humanize Arabs and terrorists while depicting the Mossad, and to some extent the CIA, as the conniving duplicitous organizations they are. Nevertheless, it is true that Beirut doesn’t do near enough to provide a context for the war or to show the plight of the Lebanese people during that war. It doesn’t help that it was filmed in Tangier, Morocco and had little if any Lebanese involvement. 

On the positive side, Beirut is well-acted (Hamm and Pike are at their best), has great atmosphere, has an intelligent complex story that is well-written and directed and it isn’t too heavy on action (though perhaps a little more than I would like).

So I am going to give Beirut a light ***+, acknowledging that spy films today should try harder to be fair to their settings. My mug is up.