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"Syriana," Stephen Gaghan's tense, outrageously complicated thriller about oil, the C.I.A., and the Middle East, is a major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and pessimism connect it (in my mind, at least) to other recent American films in ways that suggest that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies. The picture was inspired by incidents in "See No Evil," a book published in 2002 by the former field agent Robert Baer. A chatty, entertaining writer, Baer tells raffish stories about the C.I.A. in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, a time when, he claims, the agency was ...