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Truth is a necessarily elusive notion in espionage and, when it comes to
actionable intelligence, an endlessly, sometimes dangerously transitive
commodity. Defining “actionable intelligence” is itself a slippery slope, for
that which prompts action could simply be a belief espoused by the room’s
loudest, or most persuasive, voice. Even then, tough questions. How does one
reconcile a lead driven more by hope than knowledge, with an almost incalculable
risk of inaction? And where might that take you? Nowhere? Into a fatal trap? Or,
as we find at the exhaustive end of “Zero Dark Thirty,” director Kathryn Bigelow
and screenwriter Mark Boal’s meticulously engrossing and engaging film, to an
empty uncertainty that follows the death of the quarry? This creative duo’s
follow-up to “The
Hurt Locker” is simultaneously a long-form journalism piece, docudrama,
thriller, action film and character study. And the fate of the prey is hardly a
spoiler when his name is Osama bin Laden, whose pursuit over a decade-long,
post-9/11 manhunt is rigorously dissected here.
“Zero” is procedural enough to be broken into chapters, but it’s never a dry,
dispassionate presentation of exhibits and evidence. And although the film
concludes with the bracing, muscle-knotting intensity that’s Bigelow’s
stock-in-trade, it’s weary and wise enough to avoid the obvious flag-waving
while depicting the Pakistan raid in which bin Laden was shot and killed. No,
this film’s unshakably monolithic power and suspense derives not from the
bullets fired but the dominoes felled to arrive at that moment.
Horrifying but not exploitative, its prologue is a reminder of the high-running
emotions of Sept. 11, 2001 — scanner traffic, phone calls, voicemails in the
aftermath of the attacks. As a nation under siege, this was our chatter, our
intel. Its mounting pitch and thrum is a chilling contextualization, mirroring
the thrum of noise through which our fictionalized protagonists spend the next
10 years sifting. That’s a far cry from “Zero’s” original incarnation, which was
to have covered just the three months immediately following that morning. Boal
and Bigelow had prepped to chronicle the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora — a
five-day military firefight in the mountains of Afghanistan, from which bin
Laden escaped to Pakistan.
But when word of the al-Qaeda founder’s May 2011 death dominated the news cycle,
Boal and Bigelow regrouped on the fly. Boal, a veteran journalist, tapped many
of his same CIA sources for the details of how the intelligence community
eventually led SEAL Team Six to the sand-caked door of a Pakistan compound. Not
surprisingly, “Zero” now has immediacy some have pegged as insurgency. Just last
week, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced an investigation into whether Boal and Bigelow received inappropriate access to classified information. And
before those outside Hollywood’s inner circle saw the film, debate raged in
Washington’s beltway as to its endorsement of “enhanced interrogation” —
bureaucratese for “torture” — as the gateway to bin Laden’s whereabouts.
“Everyone breaks, bro. It’s biology.” Such is the deceptively dulcet tone of Dan
(a mesmerizing Jason Clarke), a CIA
interrogator at an off-book “black” site in Pakistan. It’s there that
the audience, along with newly arrived CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), is
disturbingly oriented into his day-to-day work. Although
limited to the first act, Bigelow’s depiction of waterboarding, sensory abuse,
stress positioning and humiliating nudity is astoundingly difficult to watch —
as it should be. Does Dan’s prisoner eventually divulge the alleged whereabouts
of bin Laden’s personal courier — critical intel onto which Maya latches over
her long pursuit? Yes, but it’s in a moment of mental cunning disguised as
relative kindness.
And given an eventual choice Dan makes, his ominous mantra might as well apply
to the men and women who employ such methods. The movie neither condones nor
condemns his actions. It simply presents the circumstances and allows viewers to
arrive at unguided
judgment — less about its efficacy in eliciting information
about bin Laden than about whether it was worth the moral quagmire.
Maya, too, is unnerved by what she sees at the black site, but she knows to
leave the room or even hint at discomfort would be a sign of weakness. That’s a
perception she knows well enough not to feed, for she’s very much aware she is
“the other” — which is to say a wo man
in a field dominated by testosterone and machismo. This builds to neither a
showboating, crowd-pleasing rallying cry for
feminism nor an ego-feeding, stand-in metaphor for Bigelow as the rare female
action filmmaker. Instead, it’s just a quietly motivational character trait,
subtly underscored in Boal’s script and Bigelow’s staging — the way Maya is
shoved into the corner of a conference room at the most pivotal point of her
investigation or how dismissively someone identifies her in the moment of
accomplishment for which she’s yearned.
It’s but one nuance of “Zero” that draws the most magnetic performance yet out
of Chastain, a chameleonic character actress. It’s work that simmers rather than
explodes, and it’s all the trickier a balancing act for it, and remains
resolutely compelling throughout. Maya’s lone moment of exhalation at film’s end
is born not of triumph but psychological unmooring — an unforgettable depiction
of all, and just how much, her passage beyond dedication, and into obsession,
has cost her.
“Zero’s” critical detractors have pegged Dan and Maya as detached ciphers — icy
and impenetrable pawns whom Boal and Bigelow strategically move for the sake of
their narrative endgame. A counterargument: When eagerness is the deadliest
emotional investment someone can make, isolative tendencies become a shield.
As Maya and Dan seethe, so does the film. Catharsis is infrequent. Victories are
few. The clash between statistics and instincts yields casualties. And heart, as
often defined by Hollywood, here becomes just a physiological midpoint between
brain and gut — trusted at the risk of peril. There is a third-act moment in
particular that, in more conventional hands, would have led to an Oscar clip for
both Chastain and Clarke. It merely speaks, in a whisper, to realignments of
loyalty and certainly before moving on to the next internal struggle.
These are characters often self-ensnared and entrapped by their confidence, let
alone by the street-level terrorists who sometimes prey upon it and threaten
their lives. In some ways, this rough beast is the anti-“Argo,”
an exceedingly entertaining film that cut its tension with satire and melodrama.
Here, the identifiably human elements are simply rubbed so raw that it takes
some work to identify them.
And although the Navy SEALs aren’t introduced until the film’s final act, their
elemental personalities come into play in unexpectedly affecting ways — all
courtesy of an actor best known as the lovable goofball on network a TV sitcom.
Chris Pratt of “ Parks and Recreation” emerges in the most surprising way —
perfectly underplaying moments of skepticism without dismissive ness, grief
without sadness.
He and his team have shed crimson chasing this particular white whale before,
and he simply, shrewdly works to hear what will convince him that Maya’s intel
is something different. As for their raid, it’s an enthralling episode in which
the precision of a surgical strike teeters on the verge of act-of-war chaos and
violence.
Our journey into a heart of darkness to demand justice for thousands of lives
may have been necessary. But “Zero Dark Thirty” understands it will never truly
be done and still carries a weight and burden long beyond the moment of one
man’s death. "Zero Dark Thirty" is an immensely complicated undertaking--even
more so when you consider that until they heard the news about bin Laden's death
at the same time that everyone else did, they were knee-deep in pre-production
on a different project about how he couldn't be found that was instantly
scrapped in order to pursue this one virtually from scratch--and it succeeds so
completely on every possible level (it even manages to generate genuine
white-knuckle suspense out of a finale that was perhaps the biggest given since
"Titanic") that it would be a shame to see its achievements be sidelined by the
controversy that has surrounded it. Suffused with the immediacy of a story torn
almost literally from today's headlines and crafted with the kind of advanced
technical prowess to ensure that it will nevertheless stand the test of time,
"Zero Dark Thirty" is an instant classic--a smart, exciting and shockingly
entertaining work that really is one of the best films of the year.
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