Steven Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) provides yet another salient example of this paradigm. In fact, it shows us a number of dedicated professionals who pursue their goals at the coast of family and community. We’re introduced to a lawyer committed more to upward mobility than healing a broken relationship with his father, a few businessmen who ignore the many they impoverish in a race to fill their own pockets, and a lone CIA operative who avoids relational intimacy in more dramatic fashion, assassinating foreign targets without considering those moral and social factors that would complicate his task.

And then there’s the young husband who decides at a crucial moment to pursue a high-minded and public course of action that might benefit an entire country, instead of retrenching to the privacy of his home with his very needy, recently traumatized family.

This last guy’s plight strong-armed my attention because his uncomfortably familiar situation resembles that encountered by many of us who try to balance valuable careers and family. A whole lot of folk buy into the old utilitarian notion—so famously voiced by that sage Vulcan in The Wrath of Khan (1982)—that “the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one,” that it’s okay to sacrifice the well-being of a handful in order to benefit the company, the party, or “the masses.”

The choice faced by Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is particularly difficult because neither option before him seems wrong on the face of it. When his young son accidentally dies in the outdoor pool of Prince Nasir Al-Subaai, the apologetic Arab prince (played by the wonderful Alexander Siddig of Deep Space Nine fame) offers Bryan a position in his own progressive political party. On the one hand, then, Bryan has an enviable opportunity to help a monarch shape his (pointedly unnamed) middle-eastern country into a more just, more diverse democracy. Or, he could return to the states with his grieving wife and his youngest son, and begin the long process of healing a microcosm of three.

Forced to choose, Bryan decides to serve the cause of democracy, a delightfully abstract ideal that seduces his attentions away from the too tangible, too complicated problems presented by his family. Any number of American film heroes have made similar choices in recent years, claiming “art,” “truth,” or “justice” over and against the messy commitments of personal relationships. And Hollywood usually makes it look like such a choice is ennobling, like it’s worth sacrificing the immediate well-being and emotional health of a marriage or family in order to benefit the “knowledge” or “rights" of a nation.

Such is the case here. Bryan’s decision appears to be the best one, even though the plot violently erases the course he has chosen and forces him to return home along the path he has rejected, dragging his broken self back into his family’s home in the closing scene. The reunion is only kind of sweet, however. The movie suggests pretty loudly that corruption survives despite individual failures—however tragic—and that Bryan's loss is big business’s gain. Unfortunately, his family appears more a consolation prize than anything else.

And why should this be? Why isn’t nurturing the family and taking part in its struggles—as in its joys—considered heroic by our culture? Perhaps because the complications of family life are so much more challenging compared to the far more attainable and glorious sacrifices required by giving all of ourselves to nameless, faceless hordes.

Truth be told, if we’d spend more time taking care of those in our immediate vicinity, there’d be less need for heroic actions in society at large. I’m not arguing for insularity and social apathy, just reminding us of what we already know—that disease prevention makes a lot more sense than searching for a cure once you have an epidemic on your hands.