Zero Dark Thirty opened today in selected cities, and I am in one of those. So I went to the first showing, a 10:30 am show for just $6. The place was almost packed. It is a gritty and tense film by Kathryn Bigelow that everyone must see. It opens nationwide next Friday. Here is my review:
Zero Dark Thirty (Jessica Chastain, Jason Clark, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Joe Edgerton, James Gandolfini) – The theater goes dark; you sit through 20 minutes of previews. The black screen shows only the date “September 11, 2001.” The screen stays blank gray as we hear overlapping recordings of phone conversations between people inside and outside the World Trade Centers. That is the first 1-2 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty.
Kathryn Bigelow, the first female Academy Award-winning director, hooks you right from the start. You are transported to Pakistan for the “reality” of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (referred to throughout as UBL for Usamah Bin Laden) and his top deputies. Maya (Jessica Chastain), in her first foreign posting for the CIA, arrives to join Dan (Jason Clark), the lead interrogator for the CIA in Islamabad. The interrogation is harsh, graphic, and raw but no worse than anything you have seen on “24.” She is squeamish at first, particularly as she is acclimating to her new environment. Is she up to it? As the CIA station chief, Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights) puts it: “Washington says she’s a ‘killer.””
The entire movie centers on the search for UBL and, in particular, Maya’s obsession with getting the mastermind of 9/11. Flowing freely between Pakistan, Afghanistan and Washington, the plot is mesmerizing, tense, methodical and ponderous. It is full of black holes, blown leads, terrorist acts, bombings, and the loss of agents, all of which were documented from actual footage. Maya never gives up on a lead that came years before from a detainee. The trail goes cold many times before it becomes promising as a courier is spotted through a combination of electronic and on-the-ground surveillance. The rest of the story is, as they say, “history.”
What is so electric about the film is a combination of what feels like realism and the pacing. While covering over 10 years, Bigelow follows up her war classic, Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker, with brilliant time movement and perfect set design. The film was shot in India and Jordan and we feel like we’re right there. The explosions sure look and sound real. The CIA Black Sites look out-of-the-way and gritty. Bigelow titles the acts of Mark Boal’s screenplay (he also wrote The Hurt Locker and In the Valley of Elah), which also helps move us in time. Through them, we learn the lingo.
Bigelow’s work is so seamless that we are tempted to believe that we’re watching a documentary rather than a movie “based on real events and actual accounts.” But there has been criticism of the film already by the CIA and the military as to its authenticity. To the audience, it doesn’t matter. In fact, like Apollo 13, Argo, and even All The President’s Men, I’ll bet that people remember the movie as fact and the actual story as fiction. (After all, most Americans think that Deep Throat looked like Hal Holbrook, not Mark Felt.)
Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life, The Help) is brilliant as Maya. Of course, we don’t really know if she is a real person and, if so, if she is a man or a woman in real life. In fact, there are no sexual references, no innuendo, no skimpy outfits, no harassment, and no love interest. This is played purely as non-fiction. Chastain plays primarily very serious characters; I can’t see her ever being in a light comedy (but she’ll probably try just like Julianne Moore has done so badly). She carries this entire movie on her back. For Bigelow, she has now achieved not only her Oscar but also casting a woman as the strongest character in a war film. Kudos. The supporting cast is strong, too. The actors are mostly unknowns except for James Gondolfini as the CIA Director (why isn’t he cast simply as Leon Panetta?). You may recognize the faces of others like Mark Strong (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Body of Lies, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), Stephen Dillane (The Greatest Game Ever Played, Game of Thrones), and Taylor Kinney (Chicago Fire). But this is not a film for stars; the focus is on the storyline.
The mark of a great movie is audience engagement. In over two-and-a-half hours, I didn’t hear a peep from the audience during the film or as the people filed out. Marshall McLuhan defined “hot” media (vs. “cold”) based on how captive the audience is, and movies are the hottest of media. If engagement is the measure, Zero Dark Thirty is the sun. It may not win Best Picture over Lincoln but it will have you totally captivated and feeling like you watched historical records.