Zero Dark Thirty REVIEW “a politically fascinating drama that takes Bigelow’s craft to the next level”

Katherine Bigelow is the rarest of things; she is a masculine film maker in a world irrefutably skewed towards the male gaze. What the prior statement is in reference to is her ability to present a more complicated reaction to genre and the politics of war. This has been present throughout her career as a director whether it was through her iconic Vampyric Western in Near Dark, or her forays into the political quagmires of war in The Hurt Locker and now her latest film, Zero Dark Thirty.

Originally, Zero Dark Thirty was planned as a portrait of the failed mission to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. By the slimmest of chances, the terrorist figurehead was indeed found and killed as Bigelow was working on her latest project, meaning that she and her scriptwriter Mike Boal had a considerable rewrite on their hands. The result is a chronicle of the decade long hunt for the Al-Qaeda leader. Whether a film has a twist or a conclusion that has entered the public consciousness or whether it depicts broadly known real-life events, it is an incredible accomplishment for a film to be successful with these tightly bound limitations. Zero Dark Thirty is such a success story.

Unlike the far more action heavy Hurt Locker, this is a far more complex film. The dialogue is rife with military lingo and much of the structure is of the procedural process of fact-finding. At face value, this could be construed as boring and for some it still might be. However few directors can or have brought the world such a mature study into the machinations of war. It’s a huge tribute to Boal’s script and Bigelow’s masterful escalation of tension, that the pursuit of some names on a list is as rousing as it is.

Unlike her earlier, Oscar Winning, film, there is an issue in the material that has courted controversy in the blogosphere. That issue is torture, apparently Zero Dark Thirty depicts the notion that torturing captives is the best way to gather information, and what’s more it’s shown in a celebratory way. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality the films relationship with torture is a grizzly and complicated matter that makes the first 40 or so minutes and much of Jason Clarke’s role, difficult viewing. Instead these scenes are symptomatic of the greater themes present in Zero Dark Thirty, themes hinting towards issues more thorny than the reductive torture good/bad dichotomy.

To get bogged down in the controversy is to miss much of that which makes Bigelow’s 9th feature-length an epochal film. As previously alluded, the end of the film is common knowledge therefore most of the dramatic weight comes from the only constant in the film, Jessica Chastain. A constant which shines a light on Bigelow’s mode of operation, which is an admirable and a rarely seen quality from modern directors and that is the ability to present actors as secondary to the storytelling  Although it has far fewer named actors appearing and disappearing with the pull of a trigger finger, Zero Dark Thirty has a bounty of big named actors filling the more incidental roles. That level of class from the cast elevates the material considerably.

Then there is Maya (Jessica Chastain). Chastain plays a young agent who is sent to a CIA Black Ops base to investigate first hand any potential leads that follow to Osama Bin Laden. She is a woman consumed by her job, even when they can no longer imprison or torture for information she is pursuing every lead. Even when many of her peers have either died or moved on she is tenaciously fighting for closure to 9/11, alone. Over 10 years, she stares deep into the abyss.

The one beat that encapsulates this obsession perfectly is the final frame of the film. Bin Laden has been found and killed, leaving Chastain alone to be transported to US Soil. This is not the jingoistic, pro-America ending one would have expected from the real world news coverage of the event. On the contrary, it’s an emotionally complex climax that succinctly expresses the profound ambiguity of the post 9/11 zeitgeist. On a political level, it’s a fascinating film, on a dramatic level its engaging at every level taking Kathryn Bigelow’s craft to the next level.