Film: Zero Dark Thirty

ZDT was second on my holiday must-see list, after Django.  Strong filmmaker pedigree, Significant Material.  Transparent oscar-bait, in other words. The kind of film on which the academy loves to throw awards.

Its release schedule was irritatingly centered on NY/LA, meaning the "debate" about the film's stance on torture had already worked through the (NY/LA-centered) media before most of the country had a chance to see the film.  It reached my theaters in mid-january.

On viewing it, and particularly the opening, set as it is on 9/11, I felt again how much that day remains a fresh wound.  I'd belatedly watched Flight 93 and World Trade Center when they reached cable; the former was very tough to sit through even with the ability to pause for a break.  However, the latter was more a generic disaster movie, nearly cut completely from its historical context.  I expected ZDT to be somewhere in-between, and as many reviewers made a connection with Fincher's Zodiac, focused on the procedural aspects.  However, the emergency call audio(it becomes ungainly to discuss "9/11" 911 calls) tightened my gut to start, and only became worse from there.  The final audio clip of the introduction produced a full sense of disgust, and I questioned earlier than I had expected whether I'd really wanted to sit through the whole film.

Following the introduction, though, much of the film backs away from real-life horror, inasmuch as virtually all the major events it incorporates are drawn from history.  It is, primarily, a decade-spanning intelligence procedural with an emphasis on smart people acting smartly.  It's what I would prefer Homeland be, week to week.

The torture sequences were not as horrifying as discussion of the film would indicate.  The major reason I think this is that I've seen a ton of news coverage of the torture case against the government, and the film only once approached the kind of horror the imagination conjured from that coverage.  Another reason is that the film uses Maya as the audience surrogate, and her responses, primarily facial expressions, felt too broad and too tailored: mugging, big eyes, etc.

As to whether or not torture "helped" find UBL, I think the film is as ambiguous as it can be. Torture occurred -- and often more disgustingly than depicted -- and if some useful intelligence were gained from it, the film is far less ambiguous in that Maya's dogged, conventional investigative work is what truly made the difference.

The final act of the film, depicting the May 1st raid, is every bit as taut and suspenseful as you could reasonably expect.  It's a credit to Bigelow that you can sit in a theater gnawed by tension from events of eighteen months ago and so publicly detailed.  It's another credit that the climax of the film is such an asymmetric bookend: UBL's demise comes quickly and to a degree, offhandedly.  It's a victory that can't possibly weigh as much as the original affront.

Ten years' of air goes out of the room, and the accusation hangs over the audience as the credits crawl by:

Was it all worth it?

We'll be pondering that for much longer than a decade.



Some nitpicking:

The nature of the medium does not lend itself to one character repeatedly explaining the nature of their steely determination.  So we have instead a succession of straw men, all of whom express feelings ranging from skepticism to outright hostility toward Maya's quest.

All due respect to Gandolfini, when he appears in the film he derails any and all verisimilitude the cast of lower-recognition-tier actors were carrying (not even Coach Taylor dropping the f-bombs is half as large a distraction).  I know that Chastain will be unavoidable now, but for this film, she's largely unknown used to enormous effect.  They should have followed that lead.