Zero Dark Thirty
(USA, 157 min.)
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, Writ. Mark Boal
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong, Jennifer
Ehle, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini, Edgar Ramirez, Joel Edgerton.
Now that the hunt for Osama Bin Laden is complete, Jessica
Chastain should be sent on a mission to smoke out all members of the Academy
who failed to nominate Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director. Yesterday’s snub
makes absolutely no sense, since Bigelow displays a vanguard’s hand behind the
camera with Zero Dark Thirty. Like
her 2009 Oscar winner The Hurt Locker
or her 1995 sci-fi thriller Strange Days,
Bigelow offers an enthralling, if not ground-breaking, feat of cinema with Zero Dark Thirty.
Maya’s first real assignment is a biggie. She finds herself
in Pakistan as part of an elite CIA intelligence team tasked with the mission
to find Osama bin Laden. Maya’s a rookie, but she’s a killer, as her colleague
Dan (Jason Clarke) notes when her co-workers, including a noteworthy Jennifer
Ehle (Contagion), raise their
eyebrows at the pretty girl who walks into the dusty interrogation room in her
finest suit.
Maya proves herself a true mercenary, though, as her sharp
mind outwits, outlasts, and outplays all her co-workers as follows a lead into
a decade-long hunt for bin Laden. Like a generation of Americans, Maya has
lived much of her life in a post-9/11 mindset. Looming paranoia and a need to
ferret out the enemy drives Maya day by day as she studies the minutest of
details and combs the desert, looking under every rock and snake hole to ensure
that her lead does not get away.
Zero Dark Thirty
chronicles the CIA’s hunt for bin Laden in absorbing detail. Bigelow and Boal
have a unique approach for the material as they unearth the labyrinthine
network into which top members of Al-Qaeda burrowed and hid in the years
following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The filmmakers thrust Maya’s quest
into the mindset of both the West and the Middle East: gung-ho macho attitudes
abound about squashing the terrorist cells, but Zero Dark Thirty offers several encounters with sympathetic Middle
Easterners, some of whom assist in the mission while others protest America’s
presence on their soil. It’s all viewed through Maya’s instinctual gaze, but
what transpires on screen might be the most psychologically and sociologically
rich case of detective work this side of season four of The Wire.
Zero Dark Thirty also
displays an even hand at the complex politics of the hunt for bin Laden.
Political rhetoric in the film is scant. Not once do Maya or her colleagues articulate
the need to snap the “axis of evil” or flush out “evildoers”. Likewise, all
explicitly political references refer only to “The President” and President
Obama emerges onscreen in one sole instance in which he appears in a TV
interview and chastises the very action that has transpired in the preceding
scenes.
The President insists the need to cease instances of
aggressive interrogation techniques used by Americans to serve their cause. In
essence, he insists that torture is an appalling endeavour that puts America on
the same level as the terrorists it seeks to bring to justice. However, Zero Dark Thirty opens with an
aggressive interrogation. A man is hung from his arms, deprived of sleep, and
forced to hang limp in his own excrement. He is waterboarded by his
interrogators, yet he doesn’t break as he is flooded by hostile tactics. The
person who does snap, however, is Maya.
The man only offers proper answers once Maya suggests they
prod him the old-fashioned way. Logical questions and skillful deception turn
the interrogation to their favour; however, Dan notes that the detainees lack
of sleep works in their favour. Zero Dark
Thirty therefore begins by asking the audience how much they can appreciate
the results of the manhunt if they were obtained through morally questionable
means. Alternatively, Maya advances the manhunt through excellent fact-finding
and deductive reasoning. The search is almost thrillingly academic in its
presentation of and experimentation with various theses, all of which on some
level debate the implications of the end result.
Zero Dark Thirty, ultimately, does not advocate for
torture but instead paints aggressive tactics with a shade of grey. The tone
with which Bigelow unfolds the events of the first act, compared with the notable
turn of the second, clearly favours Maya’s investigative approach to the
material. The film shows her pursuit as more tedious, gruelling, and difficult
than the convenient shortcuts afforded by aggressive behaviour, but it
underscores the fact that democratic detective work achieves cleaner and far
more desirable results.
The greatest feat of the film, however, is the riveting
final act that dramatizes the raid on bin Laden’s compound by a team of Navy
SEALS. Bigelow unfolds the drama almost in real-time. Viewed through the lenses
of night vision goggles (via the skillful lens of DP Greig Fraser), Zero Dark Thirty captures the defeat of
bin Laden with documentary-like authenticity. All the choreography of the
tactical and technical teams—both in front of the camera and behind it—works so
seamlessly that Bigelow makes the outcome of Maya’s work utterly suspenseful. The last act of the film alone should have merited a win for
Kathryn Bigelow, but the film itself is a landmark effort regardless of what
the Academy says.
Chastain’s performance as Maya is equally notable. Like
Bigelow’s own career of forging ahead in a male-nominated industry, Maya
fearlessly stands out amongst her male colleagues. She begins the film as a reluctant
participant in the aggressive techniques that Dan uses in his interrogations. Maya,
at first a plucky go-getter, gradually becomes hardened by the job. The dark
turn in the character is felt by Chastain’s compelling performance, which wears
the psychological toll of the manhunt in every frame. Like Meryl Streep,
Chastain has a face that is impeccably well-tailored for screen acting, as it
registers the subtlest of details for the camera. The war in Zero Dark Thirty goes on in Maya’s mind
as she tries to remain one of the good guys
Bigelow offers her best film yet with Zero Dark Thirty. Not only is it the best action film of the past
few years, but it’s also one of the most intelligent, intuitive, and absorbing
dramas to hit the screen in quite some time. Even though the fateful killshot
of May 1, 2011 ensures that all viewers know the outcome of Zero Dark Thirty, what transpires
onscreen is edge-of-your-seat entertainment that leaves one breathless.
Rating: ★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Zero Dark Thirty
is currently playing in wide release.