But the script by William Monahan (who also wrote The Departed) never takes the time to tease out the moral distinctions that would make these differences mean something. Even DiCaprio’s romantic interest, Aisha, is lying, deceiving her family and herself about the true nature of her mysterious suitor’s job.
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By contrast, Crowe’s character is a proudly unrepentant professional liar, and DiCaprio’s is an ambivalent and conflicted one.
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Hani’s intricate, ruthlessly enforced code of honor is all the more effective because he truly believes in it. Mark Strong, a British actor with some of the suave menace of Andy Garcia, out-acts everyone in sight as the impeccably dressed Jordanian spy Hani Salaam. (Occasionally, Crowe’s character pops up in Jordan for no discernible reason, other than a chance to see the two in the same room.) Crowe’s physique is not just a body of lies but a body of lard he gained 50 pounds to play Hoffman, a deskbound bureaucrat with a neglected suburban family and a mobile headset affixed to his skull. As the two men team up to catch a reclusive Bin Laden-like figure named Al-Saleem (Alon Abutboul), Hoffman’s arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway style sabotages Ferris’ attempt to build an alliance with the Jordanian king’s intelligence chief, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong).ĭiCaprio and Crowe, two supposedly high-wattage movie stars, are remarkably dull to watch together-perhaps because so many of their scenes together take place over the phone. Hoffman has theories about how best to wage the war on terror-theories that have a way of interfering with Ferris’ desire to continue living. Ferris is an on-the-ground errand boy charged with carrying out the bidding of his gruff boss, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), who observes Ferris’ every move from his hypertechnologized office at CIA headquarters. I think that Body of Lies will have a lot of legs when the first 10 years of new millennium movies are examined and critiqued.
He speaks good Arabic, pursues a flirtation with a half-Iranian, half-Jordanian nurse named Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), and feels more at home dodging rabid dogs in the back alleys of Amman than he does at a cafe table overlooking the Mall. DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, a CIA operative in the Middle East who elevates himself from his fellow spies by actually liking the region and its residents.