Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
with Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
2012
It might sound weird to say that it’s too soon to make a film about killing Osama bin Laden, but that’s more or less how I felt watching Zero Dark Thirty. It’s not that the man’s death is a tragedy too recent to be sensitively dealt with, but it’s still less than two years since and they obviously started preparing a movie version pretty sharpish. In the same way World Trade Center (out in 2004) just felt like another opportunity for Oliver Stone to continue his self-appointed role as the chronicler of modern America, there’s a definite sense that the impulse to make a movie about the event overrode any considerations of the best way to do so. Of course, it’s consummately produced and performed, but overall seems blunted by uncertainty as to how to approach the search-and-destroy mission. Loathe to be gung-ho, yet unavoidably stemming from that same vengeful impulse: why else would it have appeared so quickly?
Dramatically speaking, the screenplay doesn’t overcome the problems of condensing a ten year manhunt into a feature length movie, and any sense of storytelling has been enslaved to bringing the audience through an incredibly slow moving and intricate process. When a proper set-piece comes up it is inevitably well done, but because these essentially consist of al-Qaeda’s greatest hits of the 2000s they still come across as part of a trudge towards a payoff you know is coming, or else you wouldn’t be watching the film. A lot of effort has been put into accuracy and realism, which is admirable on one level but means we have to put up with the fact that most of the manhunt was a lot of waiting, watching and listening, and not a whole lot of action. People may say with a patronisingly rueful chuckle that “real-life spying isn’t really like a James Bond film, you know”, and they’re right. But guess why there are barely any realistic spy films. Occasionally we get a token glimpse of the personal toll the decade-long search took on the lead agent, here named Maya (Jessica Chastain), but certainly not enough to power the film as a personal story. So much time has to be spent detailing the ins and outs of how bin Laden was located that there’s no room at all for character, other than brainstorm words like ‘feisty’ and ‘driven’.
The much-criticised moral neutrality with which torture is presented in this film wasn’t really a problem for me. Through the aforementioned realism the torture is self-evidently horrible, and the unreliability of information obtained in this way and the moral shakiness of asserting it as a necessary evil are both addressed far more noticeably than any real benefits the manhunt might have gained from it. The key piece of information provided after the lengthy torture scenes at the start isn’t actually gained through the torture itself, but from having kept the prisoner in isolation, unaware of goings-on in the outside world. To me, that studied neutrality was more a problem for the film as a whole, as it was difficult to get behind the manhunt as a just cause. I think the filmmakers relied far too heavily on a gut reaction to 9/11 (the film is introduced through recordings of phonecalls and recordings from that day) to get the audience rooting for the endeavour, and if that reaction isn’t there the film comes across as an efficient but essentially soulless production of an Important Event. It doesn’t help that, for all the critical plaudits she’s receiving, Chastain doesn’t make the character very likable at all; even though you know she’s right, you still feel more sympathy for the people approaching the situation with caution. I mean this in terms of the film, casting no aspersions on the work of her real-life counterpart, but if it hadn’t happened that her instincts were correct (which they could easily not have been), she would be nothing more than an obsessive irritant endlessly prodding everyone into taking a massive risk.
Kathryn Bigelow is a very good director; not exactly an auteur, but an expert handler of environments and action. Her depiction of the assassination (once we finally get to it) is particularly brilliant, all shadows and night vision until the deed is actually done, and visors are removed as though the soldiers are finally coming up for air. She and her cast deserved a better script to work with, instead of this rushed-out technical exercise. It’s not as if there isn’t an interesting story here, but when the real events lasted ten years you have to pick a theme – be it obsessive revenge, personal conviction versus bureaucracy, hell even just make it a patriotic celebration – because it simply isn’t going to work as a straight retelling.
Tom
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