SYRIANA (2005). Don't bother referring to Robert Baer's CIA exposé See No Evil, the book that "suggested" Syriana, if you're trying to figure out the movie. Rather, the key to its multiple story lines, international settings, disparate characters, and seeming topicality is that it's a generic spy story with the formula addled. George Clooney provides sweaty gravitas as a portly CIA operative about to be brought into the cold who grabs at one last job in Beirut to salvage his career and put his kid through college. His tale must compete with, among many others, those of Matt Damon's idealistic but ambitious financial adviser, Jeffrey Wright's sharp but ethically pliable lawyer, and two Pakistani refugees who undergo a process better depicted in Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now. They're all pawns of the oil industry -- or rather, they're pawns of director Stephen Gaghan, who spun the same yarn about drugs in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. It's a cat's cradle of coincidences and false ironies that feigns life through the phoniest contrivances. (126m)

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