Zero Dark Thirty, one of the year’s best films, continues in the hard-as-nails tradition of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. Its climax, which stages the Navy Seal raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottobad compound in apparent realtime, is stunning docudrama. The bulk of the nearly three-hour film deals in the intricacies and passions leading up to the raid. It centers on a driven, fledgling female CIA operative, Maya (an insightful Jessica Chastain) who finds herself front and center of a one-woman crusade to pursue ostensibly sketchy leads in the face of her skeptical male bosses. Though her gut-driven pursuit is at times chaotic, and nearly always against the grain, her perseverance seems downright heroic. When she finally gets the ear of the CIA director (James Gandolfini), her moxie in stating her case is thrilling. “Who are you?” Gandolfini asks her in a high level meeting. “I’m the mother fucker who found this place. Sir.”…Part suspense yarn, part spy potboiler, part CIA office politics procedural, Zero Dark Thirty never feels false or Hollywood-ified.
Some observers have fallen into a crestfallen tizzy because they view the film as glorifying torture as a valid means of coercing intelligence leading to the capture of Al Queda leaders. The film does nothing of the sort. It presents the question in nonpartisan, journalistic terms. To maintain it draws a straight line between the “enhanced interrogation” sharply depicted here and an adversarial position on its use, is preposterous. Keep in kind the main criticism of torture beyond its moral implications is that intelligence gathered from it is largely unreliable and usually can be better garnered by other means. Most of the politicians and pundits who denounced the film (some of whom called for the filmmakers to issue a statement condemning torture) seem to be talking about a different movie altogether. There are some tough scenes, including waterboarding, and Maya and her cohorts seem confused when the Obama administration hands down an edict tossing out torture as a valid means of interrogation. Yet a key scene in the film has Maya and Dan (an excellent Jason Clarke) receiving their best tip to date while sitting at a table offering their subject hummus and cigarettes–hardly a torture-laden endeavor. In fact, after an initial scene of torture provides only a small clue to bin Laden’s whereabouts, it is safe to say the rest of subsequent, more important clues are obtained through good old fashioned groundwork.
Politics also reared its head on another matter. Many think President Obama’s decision to stage the raid, despite the advice from the majority of his aides that it was far too risky, will stand up as a noteworthy historical legacy. Again, the filmmakers wisely understate. Obama is in the film for only an instant, seen in a clip railing against waterboarding. It’s almost funny Republican Congressman Peter King threatened a Homeland Security Committee investigation if the Obama administration was found to have aided the filmmakers. King’s fears disappeared once the film’s release date was delayed until after the election.
I can’t think of a film where the spy business has such a human face. The stresses of the job are presented both matter-of-factly and empathetically; the dangers, with cinematic flair; the uncertainties, with credibility. Maya is miles away from George Smiley’s got-it-all-under-control persona. Her fragilities multiply as she gets closer to snagging the whereabouts of bin Laden. Dan eventually needs return to Washington to take a breather from his role as hard-pressed interrogator, and not just because the government is cracking down (“You don’t want to be the last one holding the dog dollar when the oversight committee comes” he says). By the time we get to Seal Team 6, they all seem so calm and casual; so, er, lighthearted, that they’re both a heroic testimony to professionalism and a stark reminder that the “agency” spies may ironically have it even tougher. If war is hell, the 21st Century high tech hunt for payback just somehow further upped the anguish.
