Movie Review: Zero Dark Thirty

My pick for the third best movie of the year is tense, thrilling, and contains yet another great performance from phenomenon-on-the-rise Jessica Chastain. The film contains one big flaw (which I’ll get to below) but it’s hard to imagine anyone really hating this movie. It’s not the near-perfect film that The Hurt Locker was, but it’s more than good enough to earn the praise it’s getting.

What Works: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) can create a suspense sequence like no other “action” director working today, and her climactic raid on the Bin Laden compound doesn’t disappoint. This sequence mesmerizes in a Hitchcock-meets-docudrama way made all the more impressive since we already know how it turns out. And Bigelow makes the most of an eclectic cast, stringing together a chain of strong performances from TV goofballs (Parks and Recreation’s Chris Pratt and The League’s Mark Duplass) to dramatic titans (James Gandolfini) to good actors that have never quite had their breakout role (Jason Clarke). But it’s one of the movie’s few female roles that shines brightest: Jessica Chastain is a frontrunner for this year’s Best Actress oscar, and I hope she wins it. This isn’t a showy role—–there is only one big emotional moment and it comes right at the very end——but she grounds the movie in an obsession to get Bin Laden so precise and passionate, it’s weirdly erotic. It’s hard to make a CIA analyst (who speaks mostly in data-jargon) this sexy, vulnerable, and memorable, but Chastain manages to do more with a throwaway smile than some actors can do with twenty big speeches.

What Doesn’t Work: The movie bends over backwards to be impartial, and, by doing that, they actually get a lot wrong. Much has been made that the movie seems to endorse torture (there’s a noticeable shift from the Bush-era to the Obama-era), but the most galling oversight is that it never once points the finger at anyone for the failed raid in Tora Bora where Bin Laden should have been caught if the Bush administration didn’t make a catastrophic miscalculation. In fact, the movie never even brings up Tora Bora nor does it say anything about Bush administration officials refusing to look in Pakistan for Bin Laden because Bush trusted them. It’s clear that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Bowden didn’t want to ruffle any feathers or come off looking like liberal-Hollywood filmmakers, but by their aversion to the straight truth as it happened, they actually omit crucial parts of history. As it stands now, the film seems to say Obama=wishy-washy liberal who got rid of useful torture and sat on Bin Laden’s hideout for 4 months, Bush=Bush who? What Bush?

And why does the movie start in 2003 instead of when Clinton was still president and Bin Laden first attacked American targets? It would have felt more epic to show all three administrations and their different takes on catching him.

What I Would Have Done Differently: This is the rare long movie that could have been longer, at least ten good minutes set during the Clinton administration showing Bin Laden’s initial rise to the top of the terrorist heap and at least a mention of the failed raid in Tora Bora. As it stands now, the movie wants to be an epic about the search for Bin Laden, but very little of that search is actually shown. It’s more like there’s some scenes with some Pakistanis we never get to know and then they’re searching for a courier for two hours.