Zero Dark Thirty.

The wildly overblown controversy over torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty has, unfortunately, taken over much of the discussion about the film itself, which is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship that takes a script (by Mark Boal) with a barebones plot and an ending that everyone in the audience already knows and turns it into a gripping account of a manhunt and for a government’s willingness to let one end justify many sordid means.

The film itself unfolds like a series rather than a single movie, almost like the kind of multi-episode story arc you’d find on British television over a full season of 240 minutes. Zero Dark Thirty compresses its story into about 135 minutes, the last third dedicated to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, with the first third melding the needle-in-a-haystack search for information with various Islamic terrorist attacks on the west and some unstinting depictions of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” generally known by people with functioning brains as “torture,” by the CIA of terrorist detainees. It boasts the tension of a thriller despite having the plot no more complex than that of a detective story: Maya, a CIA analyst played skilfully by Jessica Chastain as a sort of Carrie Mathiesen without the crazy, latches on to a new bit of information from one of those detainees and refuses to let it go, even though years of false starts and dead ends, because she believes that what detainees aren’t saying is often as telling as what they are.

Maya’s obsession with this detail, the name of a man whom she believes has substantial direct access to the big foozle himself, leads to some slightly predictable clashes with bosses and colleagues, one played by a surprisingly lifeless Kyle Chandler, but also emphasizes her isolation from nearly everyone she works with except for those who share her particular ardor for this clue. She eventually puts together just enough convincing evidence and just enough of a threat to her boss to put a surveillance team on the finally-located target, which leads to one of the film’s best scenes, where four operatives drive around a hostile city tracking the target’s cell phone to try to identify him in person – something that could be as dull as a butter knife but is filmed and paced to layer tension on top of it.

Bigelow’s other method of infusing tension into a story that, at its core, is a slow chase down a paper trail, is to use reality to punctuate the fits and starts of Maya’s search efforts. The film opens with a black screen and recordings of 911 calls from victims of the September 11th attacks, and the story eventually weaves in the London and Madrid attacks, the Islamabad Marriott bombing, and the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Such detours provide context for the increased emphasis within the CIA’s unit looking for bin Laden/al-Qaeda on finding targets to kill, as well as creating some of the moral ambiguity that might be upsetting the film’s critics – if al-Qaeda continues to launch attacks, does that justify using unethical or unconscionable means to try to stop them?

The final third of the film, in which two choppers full of Navy SEALs (including Chris “Bert Macklin” Pratt and Joel Edgerton) raid bin Laden’s compound in the middle of the night, should have been more than enough to earn Bigelow a Best Director nod. Filmed with minimal light, often through the perspective of the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, and almost entirely from a ground-level view that further obscures the audience’s vision, it still refuses to take sides – even though the audience knows the target is worthy of this effort to execute him – and makes superb use of silence to put the audience into the house with the SEALs, while playing the actual killing of bin Laden in a deliberate, understated manner that seems so un-Hollywood it’s hard to believe this was an American film.

The claims around Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of CIA-direct torture seem to contradict themselves: The film advocates torture, it fails to condemn torture, and it shows torture as useless. Certainly the last point has value – the critical revelation from a tortured detainee comes not as he’s being waterboarded or stuffed in a box that would cramp a small child’s body, but as he’s being fed a normal Middle Eastern meal while Maya and her “I-vuz-just-following-orders” colleague Dan trick him into thinking he’s already told them key details but has forgotten about it. I see no argument that the film supports the use of torture, since it shows such techniques quite brutally and has examples of information derived from torture as unreliable. Adding condemnation is largely unnecessary; if you can watch the torture scenes without flinching or averting your eyes, you might be a sociopath. Watching a grown man beg for mercy, or the deterioration in his face over multiple scenes, is repulsive enough. Bigelow doesn’t need to turn this into a finger-wagging morality play because the truth itself mocks us for our own indifference.

Boal’s script runs the story like a documentary without interviews, as if we’re watching action in real time, with so much emphasis on the central storyline that we are spared subplots or any real investment in characters beyond Maya. That means that some talented actors appear in very limited roles, such as the CIA station chief, Jessica, played by Jennifer Ehle, looking more like a bewigged Meryl Streep than Elizabeth Bennet; or Edgerton and Pratt, who get a few moments of seriousness and a few of clowning before setting off on the climactic raid. I’m usually a strong advocate of character development in films, especially ones of this length, but there is so much to the underlying story and its unfurling is so masterful that any digressions to give us more on the characters would have like punching pinholes in a garden hose. Perhaps the script’s worst moment comes when Jessica tries to grill Maya over her personal life, including lack of friends (really? not a single one?) or disinterest in office hookups (“I don’t want to be the girl that fucks,” a throwaway phrase ironic given Maya’s later deployment of profanity that marks one of the film’s best lines).

I don’t understand how Bigelow ended up on the outside of the Best Director Oscar nominations, and I’m not enough of an expert on film direction to offer more than an amateur’s “I don’t get it” on the subject. Zero Dark Thirty is superb almost start to finish, definitely the strongest of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, with Chastain a worthy Best Actress nominee, although I’d still lean toward Jennifer Lawrence for her work with a more complex role in Silver Linings Playbook. To the credit of Boal, Bigelow, and Chastain, however, they turned a marvelous trick with her character: They’ve built a strong, smart, desexualized female protagonist who ends up pretty damn sexy just by being awesome.

On the same subject, two books earn a number of mentions in articles about the Zero Dark Thirty non-troversy: Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden and the pseudonymous SEAL team member Mark Owen’s No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. I’ve never read either book.

Comments

  1. I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night and your review is spot on. The film was stunningly good and it’s a joke that Bigelow wasn’t nominated. Like you, I’m not an expert, but I think her directing work here was at least as good as in Hurt Locker, which she obviously won for.

  2. Klaw, I agree with the review, but no love for James Gandolfini?

  3. Definitely the best movie I saw from 2012. I just wanted to concur that the raid scene was so intense that I don’t think I breathed the entire time. We knew the outcome, but it was so well filmed that I barely breathed. I cant believe she was not nominated for Best Director.

  4. Have not seen it yet, but thanks for repudiating the claims around the torture issue. I really questioned whether a filmmaker of Bigelow’s apparent integrity and finesse would espouse it as a method to get good intel, and I’m glad to hear that it is more likely once again critics making assumptions about the filmmaker and the intelligence of the audience. Will try to see it this week, thanks Klaw.

  5. I disagree with your summary of the scene where Ammar gives up the name of the courier. Yes, he gives up the name while eating “normal Middle Eastern meal.” But at first he doesn’t reveal anything. He doesn’t actually give any useful any information until the Dan character threatens to hang him back up. It’s pretty clear: If Dan hadn’t tortured him previously, Immar wouldn’t have talked during the meal. That’s clearly pro-torture.

  6. To piggyback off of Aaron’s comments, I believe that Dan and Maya’s trick works so effectively because of it’s potential for reality – something that is directly influenced by the previous torture . Ammar has been physically and mentally ravaged to the point where his memory has almost entirely fleeted from his being. His mind is disoriented to the level that he ends up going along with Dan’s trap because he honestly believes Dan’s (actual) lies might, in fact, be reality. Without the torture, and levels of mental depravity that he was subjected to, I highly doubt Ammar would have confessed the information over a “normal Middle Eastern meal”.

  7. I haven’t seen the movie yet (but probably will this weekend). For Kllaw and anyone else who hasn’t read either The Finish or No Easy, I’d highly recommend both, especially if you’ve seen or plan on seeing the movie.

  8. Keith, not sure if you’ve seen The Life of Pi but IMO, Ang Lee should win Best Director hands-down…phenomenal book that was nearly impossible to turn into a coherent movie but Lee succeeded spectacularly. I agree that Zero Dark 30 was also an incredible movie (and should win Best Picture) but Ang Lee should get Best Director.

  9. Hey Keith….longtime reader. I loved the review even though I disagree with your opinion. However, your review will force me to go see it again.

    I liked the film but thought it was merely good but overrated due to the subject matter. I understand the movie is from the CIA side but there was little to no mention of the training the SEALs went through to perfect the mission. Bigelow made it seem like they got their orders and went off on the mission. She added the guy saying during the raid, after UBL got shot, something to the effect of, “I shot the guy on the third floor,” in a subtle yet excited way while everybody else gathered intelligence. You should read No Easy Day. It paints a clearer picture as to how selfless these guys are.

    Also, you said that the most reliable piece of information was given during a simple meal and not while being tortured but you neglect to mention that Dan and Maya were able to convince the detainee he provided useful information because they kept him awake for some incredible amount of time. I forget what they said in the film. I thought it was something to the effect of 100+ hours with heavy metal blaring. That’s torture, is it not?

    Keep up the great work here and at ESPN.

  10. I was dragged kicking and screaming to this movie as I generally have no patience for watching war/violence, but I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there was war/violence, but there were so many more intriguing story lines. The focus on the behind the scenes contributions of the CIA, specifically women, was something I’d never given any thought to. (My previous analysis of the Bin Laden killing was limited to wow, those SEAL team members are badasses.) I could not watch the torture scenes but I appreciated the “this is what happened, you judge whether or not it helped” attitude of the film. And the idea of making one project your life’s work and sticking to your instincts despite numerous people telling you you’re wrong is inspiring.
    Maya found herself in many situations where she was surrounded by men whose opinions were granted more credence simply because they came from a speaker with a penis. I loved the non “ladylike” way she demanded they give her opinion the attention it deserved. In general, this movie refused to let Maya become a stereotype, and I appreciated that she didn’t have a male love interest to “save her” or draw strength from, because she was pretty fucking strong all by herself.