→ January 16, 2013
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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.

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→ December 3, 2012
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Argo.

Ben Affleck’s Argo earned substantial praise right out of the chute when Roger Ebert tabbed it as the likely Best Picture winner based on, I presume, a strong story, well-acted, with Hollywood at its heart. (You just have to look at last year’s Best Picture winner to see how much that last point matters.) That aside, I knew the true story behind Argo was in itself interesting enough to make me want to see the film, as did the trailer that strongly evoked the look and feel of an era that exists largely at the periphery of my memories – I remember the hostage crisis and clearly remember seeing the bulk of the American hostages deplaining when they were finally released in 1981 – even if the film played a little loose with history. As it turns out, Affleck and company did a masterful job of infusing drama into a story where the conclusion is known to all at the film’s beginning, and the work they did in recreating 1979 provides a massive injection to your suspension of disbelief, to the point where even the bits that seem obviously false, like coincidental timing of two events, don’t break the spell the movie has over the viewer. The result is a heist movie without the pervasive unreality of most heist movies, yet one that retains the dry humor that sets the best heist movies apart from the rest.

The story, well-known by now but classified until 1997, involves the escape of six employees at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day that demonstrators breached the gates and stormed the building, taking another 60-odd employees hostage for what turned out to be 444 days. The six employees who escaped spent a night at the British embassy but had to leave and eventually found sanctuary at the Canadian embassy thanks to the courage of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, and his wife, Pat, who could have faced execution had they been caught by the Revolutionary Guard. (Taylor discussed the story with BBC Witness earlier this week, stating that the biggest problem for his six houseguests wasn’t fear of discovery but boredom.) The U.S. government was aware early on that these six employees had escaped, but couldn’t come up with a viable plan to rescue them until extraction expert Tony Mendez (played by Affleck) came up with the idea to create a fake movie, with Mendes himself playing the film’s Canadian producer and the six escapees playing members of the film crew. The film in question was called Argo, and was a fairly blatant Star Wars ripoff that happened to be set in a place that made Iran a plausible location for the crew to be scouting. The group of seven ended up leaving Iran without as much trouble as Affleck’s film would indicate, although the truth would have been fairly dull on the screen, and Affleck also boosts the tension with a substantial amount of gallows humor from all angles, including John Goodman and Alan Arkin hamming it up beautifully as the fake film’s makeup guy and executive producer. (Goodman also appeared in last year’s Best Picture winner, The Artist, and if there were a way to quantify the most underrated actors in Hollywood, he’d have to be on it.)

Argo, the real movie, shifts around the timing of certain events to heighten the drama, making the group’s escape from Tehran more thrilling by keeping them a half-step ahead of the Iranians at every point, including a race on the tarmac in the film’s climax that apparently never happened. If you knew none of the real story, however, every bit of this movie would seem plausible except for the coincidences of timing – Arkin and Goodman returning to their sham office in Hollywood just as the Iranian authorities are calling to confirm Mendez’ phony credentials, or the CIA finally authorizing the group’s tickets on SwissAir as the seven are waiting at the ticket counter at Tehran’s airport. The pacing, however, is so crisp that most viewers won’t have enough time to think about these improbabilities; the script never dwells too long on any one character, scene, or plot point, taking a story that, in reality, probably played out quite slowly and instead turning it up to fourth gear almost from the moment Affleck first appears on screen.

His appearance, and those of the six refugees, also help cement Argo‘s power to suck you into its story even with the occasional artistic license. Images during the final credits show how carefully the actors were chosen and made up to resemble the largely-unknown people they’re portraying, with hairstyles and fashions that are instantly recognizable for their era. The film is shot with the slightly muted tones you see when watching movies filmed in that era, while the settings, mostly in Tehran but also in D.C. and in Hollywood, are just as carefully constructed to take you back to that time period. The shots of Tehran are especially stunning, including reenactments of violent street demonstrations that will certainly evoke memories in any viewer my age or older.

Affleck will likely get a Best Director nod for Argo and perhaps one for Best Actor as well, but beyond his central role, it’s an ensemble effort, with the actors playing the refugees working with limited material to carve out unique identities for their characters, and only Bryan Cranston, playing Mendez’ supervisor at Langley, getting enough screen time to earn award consideration. I haven’t seen enough contenders to consider whether Argo deserves to win Best Picture, or even be nominated, but it would be ironic and perhaps a bit awkward if a film that paints the Iranians as dimwits were to earn that honor when the unbelievable Iranian film A Separation was consigned to the foreign-language category just a year earlier.

If you want more of the true story behind the film: the Wired story from 2007 that Affleck optioned for the film version; The Houseguests: A Memoir of Canadian Courage and CIA Sorcery, a self-published memoir from Mark Lijek, one of the six embassy employees rescued by the CIA; and Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, co-authored by Tony Mendez himself.

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→ December 24, 2011
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film).

I rate John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy among the best suspense novels I have ever read, a wordy but incredibly tense spy novel from 1974 that borrows from the great detective novels of thirty to forty years prior. Hearing Gary Oldman was set to play the lead in the first adaptation for the theaters was exciting and worrying, not so much about Oldman but about how well such a dense book could be adapted to the two-hour constraints of the modern cinema. The worry was needless, as the adaptation, while dispensing with much of the detail of the book, is extremely faithful to the novel’s plot, and one of the most intense smart films I have ever seen.

(I have not seenthe six-hour BBC adaptation from 1979, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, so I can’t offer a comparison – and, given the differences in duration and thus most likely in pacing, perhaps I’m also not hampered by the comparison either.)

The four words in the film’s title refer to codenames for five* senior British intelligence officers, one of whom is a Soviet double agent, referred to as “Gerald” in the book but only as “the mole” in the movie. As the movie opens, we see a botched operation in Budapest that appears to leave another British agent mortally wounded, after which the head of the unit, known only as “Control,” and senior agent George Smiley (Oldman) are sacked. Several months later, after Control’s death, Smiley is approached by Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees MI6, the domestic intelligence agency known colloquially as “the Circus” (for Cambridge Circus, where Le Carré has located MI6’s offices), to lead an off-the-books investigation to identify the mole. Officially retired, Smiley recruits the young Peter Guillam, still employed by MI6, and one other retired agent to find out how Budapest truly went awry, what happened in Istanbul with rogue agent Ricky Tarr, and to ultimately set the trap into which the mole will walk.

*The fifth is Smiley, who is absolved from guilt when the investigation begins, while the name “Poorman” is used for the remaining suspect.

Oldman plays Smiley with tremendous understatement, especially in comparison to roles like Stansfield or Sirius Black, very much in keeping with Le Carré’s Smiley, who, even when beset by inner turmoil, rarely lets it reach the surface, and prefers to conduct his interrogations as the facilitator rather than the aggressor. This is a film of absent looks and tense pauses, with Smiley setting up the pins for others to knock down. Whether this is Best Actor nomination material or not depends largely on performances I haven’t seen by other actors, but its subtlety might mask its degree of difficulty to the point where voters overlook how key Oldman’s performance was to the film; his one great scene, reimagining a conversation with a briefly captured Soviet agent in Delhi several years previously, nearly explodes with Smiley’s emotional turmoil (and the symbolism of the purloined lighter), yet never quite boils over. One can only imagine the American remake, what with smashed lamps or over-the-top profanity or whatnot.

Aside from Oldman, the cast reads like the leading British actors were all fighting each other to get parts in the film, resulting in some powerful performances by big names in modest roles. Colin Firth appears as the caddish Bill Haydon; Ciarán Hinds (perhaps known best as Albus Dumbledore’s brother in the last two Harry Potter films) is underused as Roy Bland; John Hurt, as Control, is apparently morphing into Ian McKellen; Stephen Graham (of Snatch and Boardwalk Empire) has a critical cameo; and Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in the current BBC series starring that character) is even more critical as Peter Guillam, as tied up by internal demons as Smiley yet less able to restrain them. Even Tom Hardy, as Ricky Tarr, the one character who shows substantial emotions in the film (crossing the line into the pathetic, a deviation from the literary Tarr), manages to avoid sliding into the melodramatic.

The pacing of Tinker Tailor is outstanding, a direction set in the opening sequence, where the screenwriters have heightened the tension by putting the blown operation first. I remembered just enough of the book to follow the story without trouble – I actually remembered the codename of the mole, but not his actual identity, so I wasn’t sure of the ending until the big reveal. However, if you haven’t read the book, the film doesn’t waste much time with explanatory material, and it might take you a few scenes to figure out who’s who and what exactly is under investigation. The flashback scenes aren’t that clearly delineated from the present-day investigation, since they only go back a year or so and can’t be distinguished with hair and makeup. Karla, the fanatical KGB super-agent who never appears in the film except in flashbacks where only his torso is visible, also never receives any sort of introduction before characters begin referring to his existence. We lose some of the backstory of the four suspects, but it’s less necessary in a film that revolves around Smiley and the unraveling of the intrigue, rather than, say, the psychological motivation of the traitor.

The upside of the lack of long-winded explanatory passages is that the film drops you right in the heart of the action, grabs you by the throat, and spends two hours daring you to breathe. And yet there are no cheap, mass-market gimmicks to turn a taut, intelligent spy novel into a mainstream action flick; the furthest it panders is the occasional bit of inserted humor, or the on-screen death of a character whom I think was merely presumed killed by the Russians in the book, but nothing that changes the plot itself, which is ideal as the plot is the book’s greatest strength. (Connie Sacks’ one laugh-inducing line, while funny, is hopelessly out of tune with the rest of the movie, unfortunately.) Deviate from the details if you must, but when the plot’s the thing, leave it be, and the screenwriters – one of whom died at age 49 of cancer before the film was released – did just that.

The only real issue I had with this adaptation is the ending, where the final exposure of the mole’s identity is cut quite short, replaced with a series of wordless scenes set to a recording of “La Mer,” a great song that seemed forced here in a film so reliant on silence through its first 120 minutes. I could have done with less of that, especially the final flashback to the agency holiday party, and more with Smiley confronting the turncoat. It was an average finish to an otherwise plus film, one I’d gladly see again to watch for details I missed because I was so engrossed in the plot.

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