Jessica Chastain delivers strong performance
At the very beginning of “Zero Dark Thirty,” audiences experience a brief prologue over a dark screen — the voices of World Trade Center victims making emergency calls on Sept. 11, 2001.
This isn’t a movie filled with surprises or revelations. We all know the story about the hunt for Osama bin Laden — it ends with the former al-Qaida leader in a body bag. All of the enthrallment and tension within “Zero Dark Thirty” comes from seeing how director Kathryn Bigelow dramatizes the events leading up to that moment.
Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (who collaborated for “The Hurt Locker” in 2009) avoid all of the politics behind bin Laden’s capture and take a more journalistic approach.
But at its heart, “Zero Dark Thirty” is pure entertainment, an old-fashioned espionage thriller that takes from real-life events.
After the black-screened montage, a title announces that the movie is “based on firsthand accounts of actual events.” We are then taken two years later to a CIA “black site,” where intimidating veteran interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke) along with the movie’s heroine, CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), question a suspected al-Qaida prisoner.
Chastain’s performance has already designated her as the frontrunner for Best Lead Actress in the Oscar race, and for good reason. She successfully gives us something we see too rarely on screen: a strong, hard-nosed female character with the strength and charisma to stand alone in a mostly male-dominated genre.
Maya eventually takes over Dan’s role, becoming tenacious and proving proficient at intimidating her boss, Special Agent Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler).
Little is known about her or her past, except that she’s not the kind of woman to screw around with co-workers. Obsession runs her life — an obsession that will make her go to any extreme to find bin Laden.
Plenty of thrilling moments take place within the film, from gunfire to sudden explosions. But the movie doesn’t officially switch into thriller mode until the final act, when the sardonic Navy SEALS bring the gunfire directly to bin Laden’s hideaway, where cinematographer Greig Fraser switches the camera work between night–vision views and standard. The miraculous part is that he keeps the camera going through the action without getting too shaky.
This final raid isn’t played out like a generic action film. It’s shown in real time, exposing the realities of how things can go wrong, and that when deaths occur, they can be brutal.
In reminding us all of the time it took to complete this manhunt, Boal breaks the story up into episodes or sequences in the search identified by intertitles — “The Meeting” and “Tradecraft,” for instance. After all, there are no Hollywood shortcuts in the real world of chasing and identifying targets, which forces the audience to be patient.
The real tension the movie presents comes from the price of the years of failure to find bin Laden — attacks in Saudi Arabia, London, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even on CIA agents themselves.
“We are FAILING. Get me TARGETS,” Maya explodes in her boss’s face while expressing her urgency to act on her big leads.
The biggest media debate regarding “Zero Dark Thirty” involves the accusations that the movie glorifies. The movie certainly doesn’t encourage the idea, but it contains some implications that some useful information was obtained using enhanced interrogation methods on a suspect. Bigelow leaves the stance on torture to the viewer; its lack of bias keeps the narrative from getting cornered into the ethics.
What “Zero Dark Thirty” magnifies is all of the people saddled with their own taxing duties as part of the manhunt. It delves deep into the psyches of these characters and the stress that comes with their jobs, so much so that the audience can make a connection with them.
When the manhunt was completed at the end of the film, there were no feelings of victory or elation. They, like everybody else, just felt relief.
Bigelow has made here a spectacular nonpolitical war film with little patriotism or rah-rah backslapping.
Despite the knowledge of the story and its ending, “Zero Dark Thirty” is still a gripping and emotional experience.