short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Zero Dark Thirty (2012, USA)

The part of Zero Dark Thirty that rings truest for me is how much one water cooler conversation spy Maya (Jessica Chastain) has with her colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) ends up illuminating her character. The two are talking about finding sources, getting intel on Al Qaeda. Jessica wonders why they just can’t promise rewards like so many agencies did during the Cold War. Maya counters that this conflict is not about making a better life, escaping the madness of war for peace and stability—these people are true believers, fanatics, and no amount of cash is ever going to sway them. It’s this comment that informs the final shot of the film, and shows Maya’s struggle as maybe not being too far off from that of the men she hunts. Zero Dark Thirty works best for me as this kind of character study, though it spends a lot more time on plot. It’s not that the plot is uninteresting, or even underdeveloped—it just seems so hysterically factual, if that makes any sense. It’s as if Kathryn Bigelow struck out to make the definitive war film for our era, one grounded by a film language so stripped-down that it makes Argo, with its somewhat-similar plot, look like a cartoon. I found The Hurt Locker to be a much more human film, possibly because it tempered its punishing realism with a fictional plot, rather than by a seemingly obsessive need to show things how they happened. And as much as I enjoy a good procedural drama, whatever its base, I am almost never as impressed as I am by a film that invents a new world in order to reflect back my own (see my Beasts of the Southern Wild review, a movie I saw the day before Zero Dark Thirty).

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