Syriana.

Directed by Stephen Gaghan (Warner Brothers, 2005)

Edward R. Murrow complained in George Clooney's last film that television should occasionally educate the American public, and if Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, and Syriana are any indication, school is definitely in session in Hollywood--and the course is political science.

In Syriana, writer/director Stephen Gaghan has crafted a brain-teasing political thriller, starring Clooney, about what nations and corporations are willing to do for a shrinking pool of oil. This multifaceted nightmare about corruption, greed, and terror might not just make us smarter but could improve our performance as citizens.

Untangling and interpreting Gaghan's knotty web of tales about burnt-out CIA agents, greedy oil tycoons, and cynical Washington operatives takes some heavy lifting, but so does citizenship, and if the complexity of plotlines in Syriana has us wanting to throw up our hands in confusion and surrender, Gaghan and Clooney's scathing view of the all-too-human politicos and CEOs normally entrusted to make these hard choices for the rest of us is enough to make anyone sign up for Citizenship 101.

Like Traffic and Crash, other recent cinematic feats of serpentine storytelling, Syriana rejects both the narrow perspective of a single narrator and the simplistic approach of a tale of heroes and villains, offering instead a merry-go-round set of perspectives introducing a cast of sympathetic but complex and flawed characters, none of whom is in control of the whole story. This is perhaps the most radical challenge of Gaghan's thriller, for his way of storytelling questions the very assumptions of Washington's one-sided, simplistic, and predigested view of the world.

If Socrates was the best teacher because he asked unsettling questions instead of providing easy-to-consume lectures, perhaps Murrow would be proud of the educator Clooney has become.