Kathryn Bigelow is a director who’s had an interesting career. She turned some nerd heads in the late 80s and early 90s by making cool genre pics like the vampire film Near Dark and the modern action classic Point Break, she didn’t make many more waves for quite a while after that, and then she smashed her way into the world of respectable filmmaking with her 2008 Iraq War thriller, The Hurt Locker. She got Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for that one, and it made the question of what she was going to do next an exciting one.
What she’s going to do next ended up being this film, a meticulously researched and meticulously crafted account of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden which starts with the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 and ends with Bin Laden’s eventual capture and killing in 2011. Jessica Chastain stars as a fictional—though by all accounts pretty closely based on a real dude—CIA agent who puts the pieces of how to find Bin Laden together, follows her lead down the rabbit hole it offers up, and eventually pushes her higher ups into recommending the President to take offensive action in Pakistan. The film goes from scenes of graphic torture, to scenes of office bureaucracy, to an action-packed raid on the hidden antagonists’ compound, and it proves to be a challenging and riveting ride every step of the way.
The first ingredient of its recipe of success is the quality of the acting that it puts on display. Zero Dark Thirty puts top notch actors even in its smallest roles. French actor Reda Kateb plays a detainee of the US government who is kept in isolation, beaten, humiliated, and water boarded. Early on in the film a single tear escapes his eye when he’s allowed to have a drink, and it’s a moment that isn’t played for melodrama, that isn’t showy in the slightest. It’s a natural development that comes organically out of the scene in which it takes place, and it’s coming from a character who’s in the film for little reason other than to offer up some information so that the plot can move forward.
Talk about the great acting in this film should probably stop and start with its star, Jessica Chastain, though. The work she’s doing here is so small and subtle, but instead of being invisible it’s absolutely fascinating. You stare at her face, study it, looking for any indication of what she might be feeling or what her thoughts on the various terrible things she experiences might be. Her character is masking her emotions, she’s projecting to the audience that she’s masking her emotions, and somehow she still navigates this quagmire of expression perfectly and turns in a performance that conjures up quite a bit of emotion.
That focus on subtlety in performance starts with Chastain and bleeds through the entirety of the cast. This is great ensemble acting. You get rooms full of characters, many of whom you don’t know much about, but subtle little looks from character to character end up speaking volumes and let you know everything you need to about their relationships. These actors really feel like old colleagues who have been working together for months. The best example of this is the relationship that Chastain’s character and Jennifer Ehle’s share. They start off challenging each other, develop a begrudging respect for one another, and then become close friends. But they never talk about their relationship, we never see the moments where these changes take place, and they never even really interact in different ways. The whole story is told through little ticks in the actress’ performances.
The second ingredient in this film’s recipe of success is the screenplay that Mark Boal is credited with. It seems like there have been a million movies about government bureaucracy and a million movies about global terrorism, and they all generally blend together into a generic mess in my mind, but Zero Dark Thirty really stands out. There are a few ticks in terrorism movies that tip you off to the fact that something sudden and horrific is about to take place. If a character ever starts looking forward to something, or we ever get a scene where people are having mundane, routine interactions, then count of a death occurring. Largely Zero Dark Thirty falls into these formula traps, but it also manages to provide a couple legit jumps. And, in a film like this, surprising the audience isn’t the point. We all already know how it’s going to end. The point is to tell the story in a way that engages the audience regardless. If you can create characters that they care about, then you can get them absorbed in your scenes to the point where they forget that this is a story they’ve seen dissected in the news, and that’s all you need. Boal’s script and the people who help bring it to life are able to do just that. More than that though, Boal’s script is so impeccably structured that it’s kind of a wonder. Zero Dark Thirty is 160 minutes long and it flies by without ever causing you to check your watch. Every time it starts to feel like it might be losing steam there’s a new development, the emotional stakes of the story are heightened, and it manages to go to a new place. You can feel it transitioning from act to act just based on the emotions you’re experiencing while watching it.
The third ingredient that makes this such a success is the superior craftsmanship of Bigelow. If there was still any doubts that she’s a master director, Zero Dark Thirty should put them all to rest. She’s the one who’s putting all of these positives together and forming them into a coherent whole. Even though this is largely a procedural, plot is never allowed to take over. All the information we’re given gets layered with human performances, confident camera work, and subtext that’s subtle enough to get your mind racing but not beat you over the head with any sort of “message” that the filmmaker may be trying to convey. Most of the film is just a fairly dry account of a series of events, but they’re relayed with so much skill and confidence that they never get boring. The photography and editing rival Sergio Leone’s work when it comes to making you sit in a moment and still be engaged as you’re just sitting there. The dialogue and the acting are handled well enough that office-speak actually becomes intriguing. And then there’s a huge action scene at the end of the film. This thing is basically The Social Network if Fincher’s film ended with the third act of The Dirty Dozen.
And that assault, man, it’s great. I didn’t think much of The Hurt Locker, but Bigelow’s ability to construct an action scene made the bomb-diffusing sequences in that one so tense and so engaging that they were well worth hunting down, even if the stuff that surrounded it was less satisfying. Those scenes, tense as they were, they pale in comparison to the finale of this film. This assault is a detailed, step by step sequence of events that makes sense, makes it clear where everyone involved is in relation to one another and what they’re supposed to be doing while they’re there, and it accomplishes all of this while maintaining momentum and building excitement. Bigelow showed her potential when it comes to constructing a sequence like this with the amazing foot chase between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break, and she realizes that potential here. The raid sequence in this film is one of the tensest action scenes that’s appeared on screen in a while, it’s colored by stakes that are both personal and global, and even if it was excised completely, its lead in was already one of the smartest movies of 2012. This makes Zero Dark Thirty an easy recommendation. Unless you’re one of those jerks who wants to use its complexities to spearhead a single-minded pro or anti torture debate. In that case, just stay away and stop ruining something great.
