The gist is that no one is innocent and that the ends justify the means. On the phone, and in his occasional surprise visits to Ferris in the field, Hoffman is fighting a war whose terms he lays out in a few set-piece speeches.
Using a hands-free cellphone, Hoffman orchestrates elaborate schemes and double-crosses while going about his daily paterfamilias business: loading his kids into the minivan, helping his young son in the bathroom and tearing open a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers on the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game.
Crowe throws himself into the physicality of his character, a schlubby, tubby suburban dad whose near-parodic commitment to domestic routine contrasts amusingly with his professional fanaticism. With an unusual display of impish delight, Mr. It’s possible that this resemblance is meant to imply a parallel between the president and Hoffman, who is immune to self-doubt and allergic to second thoughts about the righteousness of his actions.Īnd also, it appears, to exercise (unlike the president). Bush himself, then perhaps Jon Stewart impersonating Mr. Crowe, showing the linguistic chameleonism that is the birthright of every Australian actor, spits out his words with an emphatic twanginess that suggests, if not George W.
Crowe, meanwhile, plays Ferris’s supervisor, Ed Hoffman, who lives somewhere around Washington and has no specified regional background to explain his odd little drawl. Crowe’s character as originating in North Carolina.
operative named Roger Ferris, once again shows his commitment to full employment for dialect coaches, following the mock-Afrikaans of “Blood Diamond” and the South Boston braying of “The Departed” with some good-old-boy inflections that are helpfully identified by Mr. Such as: what exactly is going on with Leonardo DiCaprio’s accent, or Russell Crowe’s body mass index? Mr. The second answer seems more plausible, but there are other puzzles in “Body of Lies” that are not so easily solved and that may distract from sober contemplation of geopolitical pseudorealities. If terrorism has become boring, does that mean the terrorists have won? Or, conversely, is the grinding tedium of this film good news for our side, evidence of the awesome might of Western popular culture, which can turn even the most intransigent and bloodthirsty real-world villains into fodder for busy, contrived and lifeless action thrillers? Ridley Scott’s new movie, “Body of Lies,” raises a potentially disturbing question.