Zero Dark Thirty is, among other things, a
dramatization of the CIA’s post-9/11 search for Osama bin Laden and of the
May 2011 raid that killed him his secret compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan by US Navy Seals. It is also a
meditation on the methods our intelligence services felt (or feel) they need to
use in order to ferret out terrorists such as bin Laden, in alien and
frequently hostile environments such as Pakistan. Regardless of your political
temperament, you will find this a thoughtful and provocative motion picture. It is also an extremely well crafted,
absorbing movie, well worth your hard earned ducats.
Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar as best director for her
excellent The Hurt Locker a four years ago, got snubbed by the Academy this
time around – no doubt for political reasons (Hollywood politics, that is),
since Zero Dark Thirty is at least as good. The movie is lengthy, but
never boring; revealing but not preachy or pedantic; and dramatic, but far from
melodramatic. Bigelow’s style is like a documentary in its directness; the
action is always immediate; there are no flash-backs, no narration, no remove
from what’s happening on the screen right
now.
Zero Dark Thirty is essentially two movies: the first
is the story of the ten years of intense intelligence efforts to find bin
Laden, and the second is a real-time reenactment of the raid that got him. Not
that it feels like a reenactment – it doesn’t. It feels like you are there in
the copters, and then at the compound with Seal Team 6 (except, of course, for
the fact that we know in advance how it turns out). The cinematography of stealthy
charcoal aircraft flying low through the steep canyons of Afgnanistan and
Western Pakistan in the dark night is enthrallingly beautiful and tense. Once
on the ground, Bigelow and director of photography Greig Fraser maintain the realism and the
tension by filming through night goggles, so it feels we are seeing the
unfolding drama directly through the eyes of one of the raiders. It worked for
me.
Most of Zero Dark Thirty, though, is about the long,
laborious, frustrating, and often dangerous work of the men and women in the CIA
and affiliated agencies, who were looking for the needle in the haystack, trying
to find the elusive al Queda mastermind, with very little to go on, amidst
alternating political pressure and ennui.
A terrorist-hunting procedural has some innate appeal; but still, two
hours of often fruitless investigation
could have become deadly boring in lesser hands. Bigelow and screen writer Mark Boal (In The Valley of Elah, (2007), The
Hurt Locker (2008)) not only keep us interested, they keep us rapt.
They do this by bringing us into the action and making the
story personal, focusing on one agent/operative, a woman named Maya, played by
Jessica Chastain. Questions
have been raised about the singularity of “Maya’s” role in actuality. (Bigelow
and Boal claim that the story they tell is based on first hand accounts of the
investigation.) Be that as it may,
cinematically this works. The telling of this story required a
personification of the team, and Chastain is it.
And she is brilliant. Her Maya is more than committed; she
is smart, dogged, relentless, and also tough, callous at times, and
laser-focused on the job of tracking down this terrorist-killer. Maya is
beautiful, but has no time for love or even a social life, really. She is
feminine, but not soft. Chastain, always watchable, brings a steely intensity
to this role that holds your interest throughout, whether she is poring over
computer data, studying photographs, taking a meeting, or interrogating
prisoners.
One of the controversies engendered by Zero Dark Thirty
concerns its depictions of the torture of suspected al Queda terrorists by Americans, and the implication that
valuable information was thus obtained, which eventually lead us to bin
Laden. Since at least 2009, the US has steadfastly
denied that we use torture techniques, including waterboarding – depicted
briefly in this movie - anymore. The scenes of such interrogation in this
picture purportedly take place earlier than that, and the previous
Administration was less clear and less sanctimonious on the subject. CIA and
several Senators have denied that we got any valuable leads vis-a-vis bin Laden
from such methods, but I have to say, on the evidence of this movie, that’s an
easy statement to fudge.
I’ve never been a proponent of torture interrogations, and have
generally accepted the double edged argument that (a) it is inherently
unreliable and (b) it is inhumane. However, Zero Dark Thirty reminds us
of who we are dealing with and what these bad guys can do – cold-blooded
suicide bombings of civilians and the like; and by bringing us “into” the room
for these interrogations, moves the subject out of the theoretical and into the
real; in a way that, for me at least, raised doubts. Jason Clarke gets some
credit – or perhaps blame is more appropriate - for instigating my confused
morality. He plays Dan, the chief American interrogator/torturer, so
convincingly and at the same time as such an appealing character, that my
certainty is fuzzier than it was previously.
It is fascinating and kind of cool to realize that, behind the male-dominated
political, military, and CIA populations we all assumed were in charge of the
search for bin Laden, there was a woman who made the connections, persevered
year after year, and prosecuted the case for the final, successful attack. In
the film, Maya is not alone in this endeavor: she is ably assisted by Jennifer
Ehle as a fellow agent as well as other women analysts. Having such a feminine (yet tough as nails)
presence at the very center of this obsessive search adds an interesting
dimension to the entire enterprise. Even the use of torture, with Maya’s
apparent support and in her presence, becomes, if not appetizing or morally
acceptable, less unpalatable and more understandable.
In sum, this movie is a well acted, well shot, well directed conversation-generating
experience. I recommend it.
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