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Here it is my favorite movie of 2012. Kathryn Bigelow, the thinking-moviegoers action director, continues to make smart, thorny, complicated dramatic action films about the politics of gender, race and violence. Zero Dark Thirty continues that tradition, and is a nice spiritual cousin to her other film about the current wars in the Middle East, The Hurt Locker, which was my favorite film of 2009.
Silence all of the clatter that surrounds the film, most of it is zealously picking at whims and fancies that aren’t there from people who made this claims before the film had been screened, and be prepared to meet it on its own terms. This is not the propaganda agitprop that it was made out to be, it has far more in common with reportage and an ink-blot. This is a fictionalized, heavily-distilled and simplified account of something that took a decade to play out.
That the film so coldly depicts torture may be part of the extreme reaction to it. While a piece like Argo, which isn’t completely unrelated to this material, blunts the edges and presents something easily commoditized, Zero Dark Thirty remains prickly and opaque. People wishing to see explicit evidence that torture played a key role in the events can do so only if they chose to ignore numerous revelations which come later on in the narrative. And if they ignore the fact that the characters themselves are conflicted over these courses of action, or that, for several uncomfortable moments, our sympathies lie with the prisoner of war, and not with the CIA agents enacting the horrific brutality upon him.
Bigelow and Boal have gone on the record to state that depiction is not endorsement, and I agree with them. Like it or not, prisoners of war were subjugated to torture, and removing it from the narrative would have been a joke. There’s a difference between simplifying vexingly complex jargon-heavy passages of time, and outright removing historical fact. To put it another way, removing torture from the narrative would be like remaking Bonnie and Clyde and removing their bullet-riddle death, or not depicting them killing people. The film opens with this bang, but this isn’t torture porn. The Passion of the Christ was far more overdone and titillated by the viscera on display than this film; this film presents these acts as simply being what they are and were.
Now back to my point about people finding the torture scenes to be a depiction of it leading to the killing of Bin Laden. Later in the film, which sees Maya (Jessica Chastain) stuck in an office trying vainly to find leads on the courier who slipped through her fingers is presented with an folder with information on this man. The folder was created nearly ten years ago, when the detainee we see tortured at the beginning spilled the exact same information after being subjected to nicer, quieter conversational means of extracting information. They information they needed was there all along. The torture was unnecessary to obtaining that information.
This brings us back to Maya, who is an extraordinary character, not just to anchor this film, but in general. She has much in common with Jeremy Renner’s bomb specialist in The Hurt Locker. Both are creatures of startling, almost jarring stubbornness and commit themselves to lives which dangerous and fairly empty of normalized society. Maya was brought into the program straight out of high school and has done nothing but throw herself into the manhunt for Bin Laden, even when the main priorities had been shifted away from the leader and into taking out his drones. She is filling the emptiness with her work, and stands in symbolically for our foreign policy over terrorism in the Middle East, for good and bad. Her character is admirably tough, smart and head-strong, yet her at-all-costs resolve and unresolved guilt reach their climax in the final scene of the film, which should be considered up there with Queen Christina or The Passion of Joan of Arc in great female close-ups that anchor a film.
Now that Bin Laden is dead, and the exhaustive manhunt is over, she sits alone in a giant helicarrier and is asked “Where do you want to go?” It’s an open-ended question with no response from her. But Bigelow keeps the camera on her face as Chastain begins to break down and cry. It’s a powerful closing image that haunts long after the film is over. Maya’s mission has been completed, but what in her life has she got to show for it? The question isn’t just posed to her, but to us an audience. You’ve seen and experienced where we’ve been, but was it worth it? It’s an anticlimax for an action film; much like the night raid’s killing of Bin Laden.
Bigelow has always exceled at creating tense and smart action sequences, and the midnight raid is no different. How true is it to real life? Probably not very true, but it’s better for national security if the exact methods aren’t disclosed about these types of situations. As an imagined version of it, it’s thrilling stuff.
The Navy SEALs brought in are a likeable specialist group who are great at their job, as opposed to the macho/bro stereotypes which infest most other films. The night-vision helps with verisimilitude, and the cold aesthetic choice to film it in a calm way adds tremendously to its effectiveness. Room by room, story by story, they search the house, and when the kill finally happens, it’s not the slow-motion thunderous shootout one would expect from a different kind of action or military film. His death occurs practically off-screen.
Yet the film belongs to Maya, and her tireless struggle to capture Bin Laden. And there’s more than hint of an unspoken glass ceiling going on with her dealings with superiors. If there is any group that emerges looking like total shits it’s the DC politicos who are responsible for commanding and demanding our more questionable actions in the whole endeavor. Numerous scenes show Maya struggling with the Boys Club, but the film, and the character, never makes a big deal about her femininity. She maybe willowy to look at, but she’s a remote, raging warrior on the inside as she constantly questions and actions Cold War-era thinking and planning, or bringing up how actions and behaviors can change in a post-9/11 world.
I think this is the film that post-9/11 America deserves. It stares back at us coldly and coolly, asking of us to only look at the entrapment we’ve gotten ourselves in to. This is a shadowy cross-examination, an example of a writer and director playing devil’s advocate and asking us to look at the moral, political and social compromises, xenophobia and fear-mongering that has been wholly consumed for the past decade. This is film as psychological inkblot test. What I saw was the best film of 2012.
