Beirut (2018)

For a genre picture assembled from a screenplay that sat dormant since 1991, Beirut arrives with an agreeable mustiness. Brad Anderson directs Jon Hamm as Mason Skiles, a broken American diplomat pulled back to 1982 Lebanon to negotiate for a kidnapped CIA friend. The plotting is tight, the atmosphere is thick, and the whole enterprise carries the leather-bound smell of an older, less anxious tradition in espionage cinema. Nobody involved seems to be reaching for a thesis.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and mostly negative. Lebanon serves as a backdrop and a hazard, not a population; the cast is a wall of Western faces, and the Lebanese exist largely as scenery or threat. Rosamund Pike's Sandy Crowder is the exception worth a nod, a competent operative who embezzles four million dollars from her own station, leads an armed snatch, and then applies for the vacant station chief post. That is a respectable piece of business, though the film is not built around her or around any argument about her. On race, the movie touches the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the civil war without arriving at much awareness; the marketing's promise of "2,000 years of revenge" did the damage, and the critical consensus about orientalist framing has followed it since.

The remaining columns sit empty. No queer presence, no environmental concern, no celebration of body diversity, no neurodivergent characters, no serious quarrel with capital (an embassy embezzlement subplot is a mechanism, not a critique). A closing newsreel montage of the 1982 invasion and the 1983 bombings reaches for a lesson about American entanglement, and that is the extent of the sermonizing. Mostly this is a professional thriller that keeps its politics in the background, which in 2018 counts as a kind of restraint.