Zero Dark Thirty

A few minutes after I left the theater I became aware my jaw was sore.  At first I didn't know why, then I realized I had been clenching my teeth for nearly the duration of the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow's taut and riveting account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  The amazing part of my jaw soreness, is that while there is action to be had, in particular the assault on bin Laden's compound, most of the movie takes place in drab CIA offices or dingy CIA prison cells, or "Black Sites."

Zero Dark Thirty, unsurprisingly I suppose, has generated quite a bit of controversy over the scenes that take place in those far off secret prisons.  Namely, torture generally; waterboarding specifically.  The movie does not shy away from showing the "enhanced interrogation techniques" in action.  As anyone who has even accidentally watched the news in the last 10 years should know, the debate over the use of these methods has been spirited to say the least.  The movies portrayal of CIA operatives using torture to extract intelligence that eventually lead to discovering bin Laden's hideout is disputed by such disparate senatorial luminaries as John McCane and Diane Feinstein.  The official US government line is that waterboarding and it's equally unpleasant cousins were not used in the search for bin Laden...or at least did not result in useful intel.  However, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have stuck to their guns and insist that they based their screenplay on actual first person accounts of the events.  So, who knows I guess.  Regardless of where you stand on the issue, to say the torture scenes are uncomfortable is putting it mildly.

But, fortunately, there is much more to the movie than just that.  Jessica Chastain is a young CIA operative named Maya who we meet in 2003 when she arrives in Pakistan.  She is part of the group responsible for following leads on the whereabouts of bin Laden.  She seems in over her head at first, even frail, but quickly shows a steely will behind her delicate, porcelain facade.  She believes if they can find bin Laden's courier, he will eventually lead them to the Osama.  The process is agonizingly tedious; as leads dry up or hit dead ends the years drag on and for Maya's bosses, finding bin Laden becomes more and more of a secondary, or even lower, priority.  But Maya doggedly, and irritatingly to her superiors, refuses to give up.

In the same way Lincoln--a movie whose only other similarity is that it chronicles an important chapter of American History--excels at making a bunch of conversations about government a fascinating thing to watch, so does Zero Dark Thirty with conversations about intelligence.  I'll grant that not everyone is going to enjoy that; it can be very technical and jargony.  Some may find themselves scratching their heads at terms like "op sec" and "tradecraft."  But the pace is hardly plodding, and we zip through the years of the hunt at a breakneck pace.  As I alluded to at the beginning, this will be considered an action movie by some, but there is not as much shoot 'em up action as you might expect.  Despite that, the movie never relaxes and I was always anticipating something happening...in a good way.  Whether it was a suicide bombing, a shootout, or a new nugget of intel coming in.  Who knew a conference room could be so intense?

This is due in no small part to the great perfromances from the supporting cast.  Chastain is really the only main character and is terrific, but the others are very good as well.  Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, and Jason Clark all turn in excellent performances as fellow CIA staffers.

When the real action finally does begin, it's fantastic.  Of course, this is the raid on bin Laden's hideaway.  It's an incredible set piece, with Navy SEALs slicing through the shadows with surgical precision.  A lot of it is shown from their POV through night vision goggles and there is no soundtrack other than the scuffle of boots on the ground, pinpoint machine gunfire, and their communications.  It's gripping despite the known outcome.

It's not a perfect movie, and one does wonder about how factual it actually is, essentially making the case that a single CIA operative was the driving force in pushing the hunt for bin Laden forward for over a decade.  But it is a movie after all, not an historical record, and it's strengths more then outweigh it's weaknesses.