“The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden….It is our No. 1 priority and we will not rest until we find him.”
- George W. Bush - 9/13/01
“…We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida. That has
to be our biggest national security priority.”
- Barack Obama - 10/8/08
It was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!... I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! To chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
-
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
2012
is littered with the refuse of my own disenchantment with cinema. I was waiting
and waiting for a savior that never seemed to come. There were a few films that
were great, but nothing that seemed incredibly earth shattering. Then there was Zero Dark Thirty. It might be a perfect movie. I think it was about 80 minutes into the
film, when Jessica Chastain as CIA agent Maya
is yelling at her superior, expletives flying, that I finally felt I was seeing
something with real meat to it. The fact that the film has obtained a good deal
of controversy perhaps points to the fact that it feels so realistic, that it
is so well-made, that it is being taken as "the truth". Whether Bigelow embellishes
certain aspects of the story or not isn't really as important to me as how good
the film is and Bigelow has in fact made
quite a film.
Bigelow’s film follows the 10-year manhunt of Osama bin
Laden by the United States. Mark Boal’s excellent script zooms in on a CIA
operative named Maya (whose story is purportedly based on a real individual),
who in the first scenes of the movie, we see her viewing the torture and
interrogation of a detainee at an undisclosed location. Her early years
on the case researching detainees and interrogations allows her to find a lead
to a purported courier of bin Laden’s. Maya’s dogged determination throughout
the years to support her idea and to find and kill bin Laden are what we
follow, and like all great procedural films (All the President’s Men, The
Insider), there is a great deal of suspense. Yet there’s also a noted dose of
humanism here as well. Maya’s determination, leadership, and near obsessive sense
of purpose create intense human drama.
Jessica Chastain is ruthless AND human in a performance that indicates she is quickly becoming one of the best and most versatile actresses around. She seems to know exactly how much to emphasize in a certain scene….never laying it on too thick, always striving for believability and genuineness. I find Chastain’s Maya is an existential woman on a mission. She IS her job and we see her do but little else. Even when interacting with others, it's usually through work. It's amazing in fact, how often Maya is framed alone on-screen. She's a lone wolf. Her determination to pursue her prey is tested on numerous occasions though: when her friend is blown up in a suicide bombing; when she is nearly blown up at the Marriott Hotel bombing; when she is shot at in her car. Yet she pushes on and we understand her sense of urgency, her pain at the loss of friends and colleagues…..it’s all there on her face. Her character development is interesting as we watch her disgust early on as she looks on during scenes of torture, but soon enough when she conducts her own interrogations, she is asking a fellow interrogator to smack someone on the face. Her learning curve is a short one in this film, but her story of near maniacal zeal is what gives the film its drive. Mark Boal deserves some fine credit for his script here, allowing for moments of feeling and fiery emotion in the midst of the procedures. But Bigelow’s sense for pacing is just as spectacular and one of the film’s greatest assets. Though the film is 157 minutes long, there is genuine intrigue all throughout, building to the climactic raid on bin Laden’s compound, that is staged about as well as anyone could imagine it to be.
Although the scenes of torture have been getting attention
from nearly everyone, I find there is an element to them that has strangely
been getting little attention. The film clearly places the torture scenes early
in the narrative within the era of the Bush administration. During the era of
the Obama administration, we are not shown any further scenes of torture. In a
conflicting portion of the back story of this film, is something called the
Military-Entertainment Complex. This term (which I'd never heard of before) refers to the little discussed
practice of the exchange of capital and information between branches
of our Military and Government factions and filmmakers. For example, Paramount Pictures was
able to gain access to all the aircraft they needed at a steep discount to make
Top Gun back in 1986…..but they had to submit the script to the military for
approval and positioning. This amounts to near propaganda if you ask
me, and it’s no wonder that most ordinary war films amount to nothing.
Now the question becomes, did Bigelow in fact receive assistance from the
military and the government? According to The Freedom of Information Act, it
appears that she and screenwriter Boal DID make contact and received some information from the government, despite the fact that Chastain said last week on The Daily Show with John Stewart that they didn't receive help. In this clip she mentions not only this, but that Bigelow also thus avoided government intrusion by not working with them and that they apparently did not receive equipment from the military for the film.
If by chance Bigelow and Boal did happen to work closely with the government (as seems to be documented), and if we presume the government was then able to review the
script, why would they approve of a film that puts the CIA and our country’s
practices in a bad light? That gets back to the Republican/Democrat divide and
differences in approach between the two administrations and how those means are
portrayed in the timeline of the film. Of course if Bigelow did NOT have to
submit her script for approval, it would stand to reason that the tone and
placement of the torture scenes were her own idea. I feel much better about the
intent of the filmmakers, knowing that the film came out after the election,
not allowing it to be construed as propaganda for the election. Either way, I find it
interesting that the torture scenes have received just about every
interpretation imaginable, which would indicate to me that whoever had the most
influence over those moments did not allow any particular agenda to come to the
fore. They exist here in the film because they happened.
Bigelow’s and Boal’s narrative achieves additional
depth and troubling moral implications as it takes us face-to-face with
revenge, and this is where the film starts flirting with truly epic importance. It follows in the tradition of both literary and cinematic revenge stories,
perhaps foremost... Moby Dick. Maya is the Ahab and bin Laden is the White
Whale. In cinematic terms, she's a modern incarnation of John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, or Clint Eastwood as The Outlaw Josey Wales. But the masterstroke of the whole film, is that in portraying Maya as
this type of protagonist, complete with her obsessive, single minded-goal, Bigelow is
able to reflect and implicate the United States as a whole in the film. Maya is simply the
micro level version of our country’s macro concerns in the years following
9/11. For many in our nation, including some of our leaders, killing bin Laden
was some kind of holy grail. Parallels
between ZDT’s real-world example and the narrative traditions that it recalls, adds layers to an already complex and far-reaching story, as the sometimes ugly
nature of those fictional tales hits home here, but in an all-too-real fashion.
As a document of revenge and manhunt and the search for justice,
Bigelow’s film is infinitely fascinating, and she rightfully avoids any sense
of rah-rah enthusiasm. There’s also a melancholy fatalism to the whole thing. Punctuated throughout the plot are reminders of various terrorist
attacks from the London bus-bombing, to the Marriott Hotel bombing in Pakistan.
We’re reminded of WHY Maya is doing what she’s doing and why she feels it’s
important, even if when the movie's over, there is a feeling of “now what?”. Zero Dark Thirty is also a fascinating document
of craft, of the existential distillation of one woman’s determination for an
end-goal and the process to reach it. The film is not
without potential ideological pitfalls and moral implications, the likes of
which may not fully be known yet. But the manhunt, and watching the woman get
her man, makes for absolutely riveting and epic cinema.
