Digging Into "Zero Dark Thirty"

I have a few bones to pick with the marketing for "Zero Dark Thirty," which allows it to be easily confused for a typical Hollywood action spectacular, and muddles its intentions. For those who are going to see the film curious to learn how the CIA managed to track down Osama bin Laden, the answer is long and complicated, and requires facing some ugly realities about what the U.S. government was willing to do in order to win the war on terror. And it leaves the audience with far more questions to grapple with, and perhaps some may leave the theater regretting that they peeked behind the curtain.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is only very briefly an action film, during an intense climax sequence recreating the raid on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. For the two preceding hours, it is the long, slow, harrowing story of a CIA operative code named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who spends long years gathering intelligence on Al Qaeda, chasing down potential leads on the location of Osama bin Laden. We first meet her as she is participating in her first interrogation and torture of a detainee, Ammar (Reda Kateb), in an undisclosed CIA Black Site prison. Initially Maya is visibly shaken by the casual cruelty displayed by Dan (Jason Clarke), a more seasoned officer tasked with showing her the ropes. However, as time goes by, she becomes acclimated to using these tactics herself, and her obsession with tracking down bin Laden grows.

We never learn much about Maya, but it's suggested that there isn't much to learn. She has given her entire life to the job, and her few friends are co-workers like Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) and Jack (Harold Perrineau), who she spends most of her time with. However, we do get to watch her develop from a dedicated agent into a full-blown crusader, pushing her superiors to give her more resources, to take greater risks. That Maya is generally soft-spoken and reserved just makes Jessica Chastain's performance all the more fascinating. However, I think Jason Clarke is probably going to benefit the most from his work here, as a terribly likable intelligence officer who is capable of doing awful, inhumane things to other human beings.

It's the torture scenes that have drawn the most attention and controversy, which is exactly why I think director Kathryn Bigelow included them. The scenes are not particularly gratuitous, but they are very uncomfortable to watch because Bigelow shows us everything, doesn't cut away, and doesn't try to sugarcoat or justify what's going on. There is a notable lack of commentary either for or against the use of torture that we see depicted, which some have taken as tacit approval. However, the rest of the film is just as cold and clinical and unrelenting, and it becomes clear that the film's messages are considerably subtler than its harsher critics are giving it credit for. It's easy to read in jingoism or nationalistic sentiments into some scenes, but then you notice how the camera frames the CIA agents during the interrogation scenes, and how it lingers on the faces of frightened children during the raid.

Kathryn Bigelow got a significant amount of flak for some of the inaccuracies in her last film, "The Hurt Locker," and in "Zero Dark Thirty" it sometimes feels like she's overcompensating. This is about the least glamorized, least sexed up war film I've seen. The cinematography is lovely, but starkly realistic, and even the Alexandre Desplat score is barely noticeable. Clearly some events and characters were invented or combined in order to facilitate the storytelling, but it's not so easy to see the seams. Even if some of the finer details aren't right, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal got the big point across. Osama bin laden was caught because of a decade of intelligence gathering, which is slow and tedious and grinding work. And so while there are plenty of exciting things that happen in the earlier parts of the film, including several terrorist attacks, the narrative stays right in that grind. Instead of trying to compare the film to "Argo" or "Act of Valor," I think it's much closer to David Fincher's labyrinthine "Zodiac."

It's important to remember, Kathryn Bigelow was working on putting together a film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden before he was killed, and I suspect most of the major pieces of the story, as well as its most critical messages, were already in place when it suddenly became billed as the film about how we got Osama bin Laden. But that's not what "Zero Dark Thirty" is, ultimately. It's about how, for a decade, we didn't get bin Laden, and what our frustration and fear cost us. As exciting and intense as that final raid sequence is, it's only in the context of those first two hours – and a haunting, heartbreaking final shot – that it becomes truly great cinema.
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