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Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is a CIA agent who's fallen behind. The very fact that he cares where Stinger missiles he's selling in Iran are going suggests he's past his CIA expiration date. When it comes to guns, oil and drugs—the means by which money moves in the world—you only maintain relationships as long as they're useful.

Working through multiple and complex storylines, Syriana argues that such transience is never as manageable as power brokers imagine. Stephen Gaghan's film offers up a tangle of plotlines, all having to do with personal betrayal and political intrigues, but the film's central metaphor is familial, specifically father-son. Bob's son Robby (Max Minghella) resents his cast-about childhood, telling his dad he wants a "normal" existence: "I want Cinemax and prom. Do you know what prom is like in Tehran?" Bob doesn't know, as he's never paid much attention. He's been too busy working at his CIA job, arranging assassinations to maintain an uneasy global balance.

Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana recalls 1970s political thrillers where the good man must beat his evil government employers at their own game, but Bob's moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. He's not a conventionally good man, but a weary and desperate one. Though Bob's bosses at Langley recognize his recent lapses into something like morality ("He's gotta stop with the memos"), they can't just fire him. So they use him.

They send him to kill Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who has made an oil deal with China instead of the U.S. company Connex. In response, Connex moves to merge with Killen, which is owned by Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper) and possesses drilling rights to rich fields in Kazakhstan. At the same time, the shift to Chinese ownership has far-reaching effects, including worker layoffs in the Gulf. When Pakistani migrant Ahmed Kahn (Shahid Ahmed) and his son Wasim (Mazhar Munir) lose their work permits, the younger man and his best friend Farooq (Sonnell Dadral) seek ways to act on their anger and frustration, becoming grim case studies in the making of suicide bombers. As the film's tag line has it, "Everything is connected."

Just so, energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is angling for his own payday, going so far as to bring his wife Julie (Amanda Peet) and two young sons along for a weekend at Nasir's Geneva home. An accident leaves Bryan's family personally devastated. When a guilty-feeling Nasir brings Bryan on as his own policy consultant, the naive American tells himself that he now has a chance to make energy a force for progressive politics.

Back in the States, the Justice Department makes its own move, looking for legal action against Killen's Kazakhstan contract. Lawyer Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer) sends current up-and-comer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) to gather exploitable intel and set up a second deal with Nasir's callow brother Prince Meshal (Akbar Kurtha). While Nasir is advocating women's rights and sharing the wealth, Meshal is a more familiar—not to say stereotypical—trade partner, essentially and readably dishonest, predictable and manipulable.

Ben has his own stakes, partly emerging out of a father-son plot that runs parallel to that of Ahmed and Wasim. Ben's dad (William C. Mitchell) regularly turns up on his son's townhouse stoop, drunk and miserable. Though Ben takes him in—without much in the way of conversation, as the film leaves the details of their routine and tension unspoken—it's clear, in Wright's performance, that the son feels simultaneous resentment and overwhelming responsibility. Gentle with his father, aware of his lifetime of disappointment, Ben also grapples with racism and fear of failure at work, finding his way through a veritable maze of corporate, personal and official corruptions.

But here's the rub. While Bob's son Robby—white, affluent, in school—might rebel within a system of privilege, both Ben and Wasim daily see their fathers' defeats as inevitable and ongoing. Frustrated, the sons adapt to the cruel, fanatical and radically individual politics of their moment. Corruption, as Pope's lobbyist Danny Dalton (Tim Blake Nelson) puts it, is not deviation but business as usual. "Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation… We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm." If some sons can learn this lesson at their wildcatting daddies' knees, others must bend to it, accept it and finesse it in order to survive.

Syriana Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan A Warner Bros. release Opens Friday at Ritz Five