Played with great relish by Russell Crowe in his third consecutive collaboration with Scott (and fourth overall), Hoffman is a blustering neocon hawk like so many real-world bureaucrats during the W. Every step he takes is monitored by his boss, Ed Hoffman, who dispatches commands and advice from cushy environs back in Virginia. He’s laser focused, yet barely managing to keep his head above water. Try as he might to hide behind a veneer of unkempt scruffiness, DiCaprio is simply too famous a face to disappear completely into the role, although the film’s culture of chaos does make great use of his talents for playing desperate and confused characters. Leonardo DiCaprio plays field agent Roger Ferris, who embarks on a globetrotting quest across far flung locales like Iraq, Dubai, Turkey, and Syria in order to expose the terrorist organization’s reclusive leader, Al-Saleem. Much like the real-life conflicts it aspires to portray, BODY OF LIES ’ narrative is admittedly muddy and overly-complicated in its telling of a CIA operative’s attempts to draw the head of a dangerous terror cell out from hiding by staging what is essentially a false flag terror attack of his own. Scott would lean into this sentiment by hiring his KINGDOM OF HEAVEN scribe, William Monahan, to adapt Ignatius’ book for the screen. Despite nearly a millennia of temporal separation between them, the bitter conflict between Western and Eastern ideologies is still very much the same. It could be argued that the resulting effort, 2008’s BODY OF LIES, is a spiritual sequel to KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. When Warner Brothers optioned the rights to author David Ignatius’ counterterrorism/espionage thriller “Body Of Lies” (originally published under the title “Penetration”), Scott likely saw another opportunity to capitalize on his ascendant momentum with a timely foray into the murky ethics of America’s current shadow war. His strongest work from this period - GLADIATOR (2000), BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001), KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (2005) - dealt (wholly or in part) with this convergence of setting and theme. The conflict was of particular interest to Scott, due to his artistic fascination with the phenomenon of xenophobia and his personal affection for the Middle Eastern region. It was a direct response to the sociopolitical zeitgeist, when the War on Terror was raging blindly and bluntly throughout the Middle East. The timing of this prolonged burst of creativity (I’m reluctant to call it a renaissance) was no accident, however. Yet, here was Scott, busier than ever- a couple gray hairs at his temples being the only physical indicators of his slowly-fading vitality.
It’s exceedingly rare for any artist, let alone one capable of commanding massive, logistically-complicated productions, to experience a sustained burst of creative energy while pushing seventy years of age. The 2000’s were a period of peak productivity for director Sir Ridley Scott, with the venerated filmmaker cranking out no less than nine feature films before the decade would come to a close.
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