You know right away that Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial,
top-secret account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, will be intense. The movie
opens with a single, unmistakable date printed across an otherwise blank screen
– September 11, 2001 – followed by a spine-tingling medley of interlinking,
sometimes overlapping voices, ostensibly calm and unremarkable yet loaded with ominous
subtext, the sound of those final, fatal moments before the World Trade Center collapsed
into oblivion and left a nation and its citizens permanently scarred. There’s
nothing to look at, no archived footage of smoke leaking from ruined buildings
or people screaming in anguish amid ash and smoldering debris, and it makes for
a deeply uncomfortable experience.
Zero Dark
Thirty isn’t a 9/11 movie, per se, but the memory of that horrific day
lingers below its surface. On several occasions, various characters refer to
the 3000 people who died in the terrorist attacks, as if to remind themselves –
and, by extension, the audience – why the mission is so important. The cold,
hard truth is that finding bin Laden was not about “protecting the homeland,”
as Joseph Bradley, the CIA station chief arrestingly portrayed by Friday Night Lights’s Kyle Chandler, says,
although that was certainly a factor. No, more than anything, finding (killing) bin Laden was about revenge.
Even as the years trudged by, and attitudes toward the so-called War on Terror
morphed along with the ever-changing political landscape, the sense of
righteous anger sparked by 9/11 remained. Many directors would have turned Zero Dark Thirty into a straightforward
retribution flick, complete with blood-splattered shootouts and ‘80s-era
tough-guy one-liners, but Kathryn Bigelow is subtler than that. With the same
precision and vigor she displayed in 2009’s masterful The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning filmmaker delivers a taut, provocative,
fearless procedural that plunges viewers right into the nitty-gritty of one of
the most fascinating and enigmatic chapters of modern history. The trick is
that she does so without sacrificing the film’s integrity or resorting to
simplistic gung-ho patriotism.
Like Argo
before it, Zero Dark Thirty rejects
the time-honored myth of spies as glamorous action heroes in favor of a
grittier, more authentic portrait. Gone are the shiny James Bond gadgets,
elegant clothes and save-the-world missions. Instead, Bigelow and screenwriter
Mark Boal, a war journalist who also penned The
Hurt Locker, construct a world of drab cubicles, behind-the-door politics,
tedious meetings and perpetual sleeplessness; the CIA agents themselves are not
suave or even particularly noble, just ordinary people struggling to do their
jobs as best they can. It sounds boring, but Bigelow has always been a maestro
of suspense, even back when she floundered in relative obscurity, toiling on
arthouse B-movies like the enjoyable-yet-trashy vampire romance Near Dark and the enjoyable-yet-trashy
surfing robbers cult sensation Point
Break, and she steeps even the quietest, most uneventful scenes in an
atmosphere of volatile unrest. Each second simmers with adrenaline, a ticking
time bomb threatening to explode when you least expect. Just look at the
climactic raid, an electrifying nail-biter of a scene that proves silence can
be just as important as noise when generating tension. Now, that is how you direct an action
sequence.
Despite its eyebrow-raising (yet increasingly normal)
running length of two hours and forty-plus minutes, the movie has little patience
for sentiment. If you’re looking for an in-depth character study overflowing with
passionate monologues and complicated relationships, you will not find it here,
as the plot moves at such a relentless, if measured, pace that character
development becomes all but nonexistent. None of the protagonists are given
much in the way of background; they’re defined almost exclusively by their
words and actions, with their personalities, motivations and inner psychology
left up to interpretation. It’s largely thanks to the actors that the
characters come across not as one-dimensional stick figures but as people with
stories and lives of their own that we never get the privilege of seeing.
Among the supporting cast, Jennifer Ehle, Jason
Clarke and the aforementioned Kyle Chandler manage to stand out despite limited
screentime, but the film truly belongs to Jessica Chastain, who has already
received numerous accolades for her powerhouse performance. Although not quite
as memorable as Sergeant William James, the character portrayed with such
charisma and intensity by Jeremy Renner in The
Hurt Locker, Chastain’s Maya still makes for a captivating and intriguing
heroine. At first glance, she seems somewhat bland, little different from the
prototypical idealistic, do-whatever-it-takes warrior (albeit one that uses a
pencil and notepad instead of a gun), her face fixed in a seemingly permanent
impassive expression. As the movie goes on, however, you start to realize that
the pokerface is deceptive, a mask designed to conceal the complex, vulnerable
person she is underneath. Chastain does a superlative job of conveying Maya’s
nuances – her continual struggle to keep her emotions at bay and remain
professional, her single-minded ambition that verges on recklessness, even arrogance,
and alienates her more pragmatic colleagues – through mere insinuation. When
her façade finally cracks, it’s a moment of sheer acting brilliance.
I didn’t particularly want to discuss the controversy
that has surrounded the movie since before its release, but I suppose it would
be irresponsible to not at least mention it. Much to the filmmakers’
exasperation, I’m sure, the majority of the conversation concerning Zero Dark Thirty has had nothing to do
with the film’s actual execution or story and everything to do with its
politics, as seemingly everyone in Washington, D.C., has expressed his or her
opinion on its depiction of torture, some people going so far as to accuse
Bigelow and Boal of promoting right-wing propoganda. Personally, I didn’t find
much, if any, evidence supporting the pro-torture allegations (just because a
movie contains something of questionable morality, it doesn’t mean it’s
endorsing or glorifying it), but it is undeniably a debate worth having. After
all, if a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden didn’t stir up some heated arguments, it didn’t do its job. In a
way, this feels like the perfect capper to the 2012 movie season: in a year
that graced us with a rare plethora of ambitious film, Zero Dark Thirty provides further proof that, contrary to popular
opinion, Hollywood is far from devoid of filmmakers daring enough to defy
convention and stretch the boundaries of cinema.
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