The Producers
That The Producers is very funny isn’t really up for debate: It is. At least, as long as you find Mel Brooks and faux-Broadway funny, which I do. So there.
Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane are both impeccable in reprising their Broadway roles as an innocent accountant and a down-on-his-luck producer. Gary Beach steals all his scenes as the very talented and very gay director. Uma Thurman is blonde, leggy, and Swedish, which is really all you could possibly want from an entire film, let alone one role. Even Will Ferrell is funny, though he seems to fit neither the Broadway production nor the Mel Brooks script.
The Producers is clearly a great Broadway production. Sadly, it doesn’t hold up quite so well as a film. Director Susan Stronam’s background seems to be almost solely in theatre, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the film often feels like they just took a few cameras to the theatre and set up in the aisles. Not that it’s bad, but most of the shots and editing are pedestrian and run-of-the-mill; there’s not a whole lot of energy or creativity to the film that didn’t come with the actors and dancers.
On top of that, it’s just too long. 130 minutes is perfectly fine for a theatreical musical, but it’s much too long for a film comedy. One suspects Stronam was too in love with the material to make later cuts in editing, but it needed to be done: Several numbers go on too long, and the film as a whole ends up too massive to be lightweight musical comedy.
A less ponderous running time and some more creative staging might have made The Producers as big a hit on the screen as it was on stage; unfortunately, the film seems to have been made by and for people who loved the Broadway version so much that they wanted an exact copy on DVD. Maybe they should have let Mel Brooks direct, and left Stronam to the choreography and staging she knows so well.
Syriana
One cannot accuse Syriana of not being ambitious. In just over two hours (less than the running time of The Producers!) it attempts to explore the politics, economics, and religion that make the Middle East so volatile. It tries very hard to make sense of several different stories, but seems to have bitten off more than it can chew.
George Clooney is a CIA operative who carries out some dirty business in the Middle East. Matt Damon is an economic adviser who ends up working for an Arab prince who eschews American influence and sells a valuable contract to the Chinese. The American bidder ends up merging with another U.S. company, who lays off some of their workers at a Kazakhstan refinery. One of the workers is a boy who finds comfort in a religious camp.
It’s a lot to take in, and occasionally difficult to process. It comes together fairly well in the final half hour or so, but until then there are plenty of confusing and obscure scenes, and characters who come and go with little introduction or explanation. The plots intertwine and weave, but not quite enough to infuse the story with any real momentum. There are a few nice attempts at character building, and George Clooney turns in some excellent work, but the film’s need to address all the characters and stories means that few actors are on screen for even half an hour.
Perhaps there’s a forthcoming director’s cut that will make sense of it all, but the current version tries to do too much with too little. The Clooney and Damon plots tie together nicely, but the corporate merger storyline is complex, dull, and confusing. The religious camp aspect is similarly undeveloped, with nothing tying it to the main narrative except its opening and closing moments.
Syriana could benefit from a serious trimming of the less compelling storylines, or it could use another hour to flesh everything else. I suspect there’s a very good film in there somewhere, and perhaps even a great one, but it needs to take another dip in the editing suite first.