A Compelling, Difficult Tale

Kathryn Bigelow’s film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, has generated a great deal of outrage over its treatment of torture: Bigelow has been likened more than once to Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker associated with Hitler, for justifying, whitewashing or apologizing for the Bush Administration’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” strategies. I’ve even seen writers I respect criticizing it without actually seeing it, or urging others not to see it because, by spending our $10 on it, we’d be sending our approval of torture out to the world. I don’t take kindly to anyone who tells me that I should take their opinion as truth and not have the chance to form my own. So perhaps I went into the film predisposed to be on Bigelow’s side. It’s true, the film doesn’t take a stand one way or another — the screenwriter, Mark Boal, has said that it intentionally leaves it to you, the viewer, to form your own opinions. And there is a lot left out: Boal doesn’t bring in the passionate debate about torture that was going on at the time, other than a brief clip of Obama on TV, stating that “We don’t torture.” On the other hand, Bigelow doesn’t shy away from showing how ugly and brutal those interrogation sessions were, or how they dehumanized the torturers as well as the tortured. Nor does the film fudge how much useful information was discovered by torturing his suspected associates (not much). It’s hard not to compare “Zero Dark Thirty” with the other recent CIA-vs-terrorist cultural phenomenon, TV’s “Homeland.” (It doesn’t help that I indulged in a “Homeland” marathon over the winter holiday, watching all 24 episodes in about a week and a half.) In both the film and the TV series, a brilliant young woman is obsessed with capturing the top terrorist, even when those around her lose focus, divert resources or don’t believe the evidence she’s uncovered is real. But the similarity between “Zero Dark Thirty” ’s Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, and “Homeland” ’s Carrie Matheson, played by Claire Danes, ends there. Maya has no mentors, no family, no love interests, no interesting mental illness to create extra drama. She is alone, and for over a decade has one goal only: to find “UBL” using the tools she has available. She does make one personal connection, to a more experienced CIA analyst and rival, wonderfully played by Jennifer Ehle with her signature warmth. (This is one film that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors: two women defined entirely by their relationship to their work and each other, not to men.) But that doesn’t last. The movie moves crisply through the 11 years between 9/11 and the final hours leading up to the assault on the compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan. Maya believes that finding the courier who communicates between Bin Laden and the outside world will lead to Bin Laden himself, but it takes years to convince her superiors to put the resources into locating him. Then it takes many more months to determine the likelihood that he is in the compound, and another half-year to convince the Obama administration to go in. (James Gandolfini has an excellent cameo as the Leon Panetta-like figure who makes the final call.) The final quarter of the movie plays out in real time, and is breathtaking — as good a piece of filmmaking as I can recall. As suspenseful storytelling, as stylish filmmaking and as a reasonably accurate record of a narrow slice of very recent history (based on the incomplete information available) “Zero Dark Thirty” succeeds. (There are many more stories yet to be told about these events.) Chastain’s steely, almost gloomy performance is excellent, as is the surrounding very large cast, particularly Joel Edgerton as the leader of the Navy Seal team. “Zero Dark Thirty” is not jingoistic, nor does it sugarcoat or overhype any part of the story. What it does is tell the story, in all its moral complexity and complicated human mess. Don’t let anyone talk you out of seeing it. “Zero Dark Thirty” is rated R for violence, brutal images and language. It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere.