Men With Guns

You can't fault John Sayles for being earnest. Actually, you can. After the subtlety, restraint, and narrative intelligence of his last film, Lone Star, he has returned in Men with Guns to the thuddingly obvious political allegory and kneejerk sentiments that distinguished City of Hope -- it's the kind of pompous political correctness that's the downfall of liberal sensibilities in cinema. As formulaic as a high-school play, its ingenuous ideology betrayed by its fuzzy edge and penchant for easy targets, Guns is loaded with blanks.

Set in an imaginary Latin American country, the film relates the moral odyssey of Dr. Fuentes (the excellent Argentine actor Federico Luppi, here resembling Leslie Nielsen), a naive, idealistic physician (his cluelessness about the political realities surrounding him are underscored during a proctology exam he conducts on an army general) whose life seems void since his wife died. To restore his sense of purpose, he decides to visit a number of young doctors he trained to treat impoverished Indians in remote villages. One by one, he discovers that each of his wards has been murdered by government troops engaged in brutal repression.

Along the way he encounters some iconic wanderers: Domingo (Damián Delgado), "the soldier," a desperate deserter compromised by war crimes; Conejo (Dan Rivera González), "the boy," who embodies the carefree innocence that endures; Padre Portillo (Damián Alcázar), "the priest," a disgraced cleric compromised by cowardice, and Graciela (Tania Cruz), "the mute girl," a rape victim whose plight cries out for vindication. Complementing these by-the-numbers stereotypes are the cognomens of the various villagers Fuentes encounters ("the salt people," "the banana people," and so on), Sayles's bludgeoning way of showing how in a capitalist tyranny, people are dehumanized into the means of production.

It might have helped Sayles's case had he specified an actual country and political situation -- say, Mexico (where the film was shot) and the turmoil in the Chiapas region. As it is, Men with Guns hits the mark only with the recurrent appearances of Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody as crass American tourists. In this venture into Third World strife and injustice, Sayles comes off as a bit of a tourist himself. At the Kendall Square and the West Newton and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough