SYRIANA

“In the CIA, as elsewhere in the federal government, you’re innocent until you’re investigated.”

That line, from former CIA operative Robert Baer’s source material memoir “See No Evil,” sums up the ambiguous conduct of characters in writer/director Stephen Gaghan’s worldly movie about the corruption and greed underlying the geopolitical system’s myopic focus on oil.

The title takes its name from a think-tank term for a reconfigured Middle East in the same way that “Chinatown” represented a kind of corrupt limbo in Roman Polanski’s film. Gaghan zooms in and out of four intertwined stories with breathtaking precision toward a gut-wrenching denouement.

It’s an interactive political thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat gauging every opposing character’s clandestine motives. You’ll also wonder at their kinship to real life Texas oilmen, Gulf emirs, Islamic terrorists, and White House wonks.

Stephen Gaghan (screenwriting Oscar-winner for “Traffic”) has climbed a steep learning curve since his miserable directorial debut in 2002, with his self-penned thriller “Abandon.” The young director has learned from his mistakes. Gaghan directs “Syriana” with a cinematic muscularity similar to William Friedkin’s movies of the ‘70s. Gaghan’s frequently hand-held camera chews through global locations like Beirut, Geneva, Texas, and D.C. with an economic style that never comments on terse decisions being made by the players in a grand scheming maze of intrigue.

The thematic temperature of “Syriana” runs hot. Not a single second of film time is ever wasted. For all the inevitable comparisons to “Traffic,” “Syriana” comes across with a more mature sense of restraint than Soderbergh exerted over Gaghan’s script.

Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter, wins kudos for never talking down to the audience with explanatory exposition. He presumes you’ll get up to speed with the barrage of insider plot information before the end of the movie, or perhaps even that you’ll research the answers to any questions raised by the film on your own.

Some critics have called “Syriana” a left-leaning movie, but as George Clooney has noted, it is rather an attack on a system that has been in place for 60 or 70 years with oil at the center of it. Unless the word “left” has come to mean “anti-corruption,” there is nothing that stands out as specifically liberal in the film. Gaghan makes no effort to glamorize any of the main characters any more than he displays their warts with unblinking resolve.

“Syriana” hits the ground running with a moving-puzzle narrative structure that fitfully weaves its composite characters through scenes that simmer with subtext. Covert CIA op Bob Barnes (George Clooney) sells two stinger missiles to an Iranian in Tehran. Two oil companies are working out an unpleasant merger in Texas under the undesired scrutiny of one tight-lipped Washington, D.C. attorney, Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright). One oil company is losing its Middle East drilling rights to a Chinese bidder, while the other has acquired access to Kazakhstan’s motherlode supply of crude oil.

The Chinese takeover of the Gulf oil refinery puts a Pakistani father and son out of work. The son, Wasim Khan (Mazhar Munir), is soon radicalized after the physical abuse that he and his father receive at the hands of the local militzia. Wasim joins the ranks of a radical Islamic cleric.

Meanwhile, in Geneva, energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) negotiates business with a reform-minded Middle Eastern prince (Alexander Siddig) when he isn’t looking after his wife Julie (Amanda Peet) and their two young children.

Damon’s character switches from being a soft-spoken family man with an important job to being a selfish shark interested solely in upping his personal stakes as a powerbroker in the oil game. Woodman’s character mutation is preceded by a tragic event that shares an inciting link with the brand of lethal threats that alter the attitudes of George Clooney’s character and that of Wasim.

Bob Barnes (Clooney) is the fire in the belly of the movie. After being set up by his superiors to be exiled from the CIA by way of an assassination order, Barnes finds himself betrayed on all sides.

Barnes’s reflexive response to his circumstances expresses a helpless ambiguity that all Americans share regardless of which side of the red and blue they stand. The moral of the story isn’t about anything as prosaic as politics. It’s about a much more insidious evil.

Rated R. 128 mins.