Kathryn Bigelow (2012)

For what it is, Kathryn Bigelow’s account of ‘The Greatest Manhunt in History’ – for Osama bin Laden – is very well done.  And what it is is a series of expert reconstructions – of post-9/11 terrorist attacks and, in the movie’s climax, the raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.   A legend at the start explains that what we’re about to see is ‘based on first-hand accounts of actual events’.  This statement is carefully worded and completely ambiguous.  It could mean that the witnesses to the events in question told a pack of lies.  It certainly means that Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal can do what they like in presenting or departing from what really happened.  Zero Dark Thirty has generated controversy – about how the film-makers gained access to classified information and for the ‘pro-torture’ position which some commentators have inferred from the film.   The torture scenes – mainly the interrogation of a man with links to Saudi terrorists – dominate the first part.  For me, they came across not as a political statement but as an uneasy compromise between fact and fiction.  These sequences, grim as they are, don’t have the rawness of actual filmed footage.  They’re underdeveloped as drama because the characters involved don’t mean very much to us at this stage – although one of them, a young CIA operative called Maya who is the movie’s main character, comes to mean more.   This foreshadows an essential and pervasive limitation of Zero Dark Thirty.

Because Bigelow’s priority is to create brilliantly realistic action set pieces, it’s difficult for the actors to blend in with the movie’s style and still register.  Some of them blend in at the expense of being interesting – Jason Clarke (as Maya’s fellow officer, Dan), Joel Edgerton (the leader of the Red Squadron that carries out the Abbottabad raid), Chris Pratt (a US Navy Seal).  Edgerton and Pratt are just about indistinguishable.  At the opposite extreme, Jennifer Ehle (another CIA officer) registers by hogging the camera:  she destroys the rhythm of Zero Dark Thirty every time she appears.  Given what Kathryn Bigelow seems to be trying to do, the casting of Ehle is bizarre.  Her playing is not only attention-getting but arrogant:  in her precise calculation of every detail and how the camera will pick this up, Ehle looks to be trying to invite comparison with Meryl Streep.  (There is no comparison – although there is an irony in seeing an imitation of the acting technique of a genius of imitation.)  There are other surprising pieces of casting.  As a senior officer in the Agency, Mark Strong gets off to a really bad start:  he storms into a room full of downplayed CIA colleagues and acts his head off.  He’s much better in quieter moments later but Strong’s effort not only to sustain an American accent but to make it sound natural (it doesn’t) sticks out of the faux-documentary texture.  Stephen Dillane as the National Security Advisor looks to be keeping the lid on what he really could do.  Only two of the actors succeed in staying in context without a loss of animation – James Gandolfini as the CIA boss and Jessica Chastain as Maya.

As written by Mark Boal, Maya is a pretty cliched character.  At first, we see her physically flinch from the torture in which she’s participating in a way that her male colleagues don’t.  Then she turns into a woman with more balls than any of the men around her.  In a meeting to discuss the suburban compound in Abbottabad, Maya interrupts the cautious language coming from round the table by introducing herself to the Gandolfini character as ‘the motherfucker who found this place, sir’.  When, later on, Gandolfini asks the team whether they think it’s bin Laden who’s in there, Maya blasts through the tentative 60% probability ratings of the men:  she’s 100% sure – then downgrades to 95% ‘because I know certainty freaks you guys out’.   I was no less certain that, once bin Laden had been killed, the film would end with a shot of Maya wondering, after devoting the whole of her recent life to the hunt for him, what the hell she would do next.  Jessica Chastain makes everything about Maya more interesting than it deserves to be.  She may look rattled as she stands in the torture chamber but she speaks strongly and definitely to those on the receiving end of waterboarding etc.  In that final shot, she expresses genuinely mixed feelings, which include relief and distress.  Chastain’s nuanced straightforwardness is a refreshing contrast to the clenched, monotonous intensity of Claire Danes as the supposedly bipolar heroine of Homeland, even though Bigelow and Boal occasionally nudge Maya’s character in the same direction as Danes’s – for example in her angry, repeated scrawling on the glass of her superior’s office door of the number of days that have passed without progress in taking bin Laden.  (There’s also a senior CIA man seen on his prayer mat, which recalls the Muslim the Damian Lewis character has turned into in Homeland.)   The excitement of Jessica Chastain’s alert acting comes less from what she’s doing here than from thinking of the range of characters she’s already played and the prospect of what may be to come.  Maya isn’t satisfying because she’s essentially a character in a documentary – and further removed from the centre of the movie than the Jeremy Renner character was in The Hurt Locker.   In one sense, it’s pleasingly unconventional that Kathyryn Bigelow, during the climactic raid on the bin Laden compound, doesn’t keep cutting back to Maya’s reactions.  But this isn’t self-discipline or imagination on the director’s part:  she’s not that interested in Maya anyway.

The individual impact of each of the series of terrorist attacks depends largely on your familiarity with it.   Any British viewer is going to know what will happen to the London bus on 7 July 2005 and, in my case, exactly where it will happen.  I didn’t know, or had forgotten details of, the Camp Chapman attack in 2009, so this was more startling.  A legend announcing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad immediately rang a bell but I have to thank Jennifer Ehle for taking me by surprise in this episode:  I was so mesmerised by her selfish acting that I’d forgotten a bomb was going to go off in the hotel restaurant.  During the final assault in Abbottabad, I admit the main suspense for me consisted in whether we would get sight of bin Laden (the sight we didn’t get on real-life television news).  The editing by Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg, excellent throughout the movie, is never better than it is inside the compound and in the aftermath to the raid – in what you do and don’t see.  The Abbottabad raid is impressive in other ways too – like the weird, alarming combination of masked sci-fi-ish faces, weeping kids and screaming women that recur on the screen as the Seals penetrate deeper into the compound.

Sally, who really liked the film, felt this whole extended sequence reminded you of how variously hazardous the operation was:  I think this confirms that Bigelow’s ideal viewer is someone who, like the director, is primarily interested in the meticulous recreation of real events.  I guess I approached Zero Dark Thirty more as a moviegoer – and what’s amazing in reality is par for the course in a live action dramatic film.  By the same token, Bigelow keeps the atmosphere of the raid scrupulously bleak but, if you’re watching as someone primed to distinguish heroes and villains, you’ll want the Seals to get their man.  The movie is fully realised – on its own terms – in this final section.   Elsewhere, Bigelow seems less decisive.  She starts with what’s presumably an actual recording of a conversation with someone trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Removing the usual images of the day is obviously meant to make this introduction more powerful; because this effect is so calculated, it’s actually rather offensive.  The text on screen during the film – alternating indications of where and when events are taking place with chapter headings (‘The Meeting’, ‘Tradecraft’, ‘The Canaries’ etc) – suggests a lack of confidence in the narrative’s ability to cope by itself, without these signposts.  Like many of this year’s front runners for awards, Zero Dark Thirty is too long (157 minutes) but at least time passes more quickly as the film goes on.

2 February 2013