Tradecraft: Thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty

9/11 and the War on Terror are still fresh wounds in American discourse, so it should be no surprise that Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, caused a controversy before anyone had really seen it.  The concerns were thus: it's too soon, it's tasteless, it's pro-Bush propaganda, it's pro-Obama propaganda, it's a violation of classified info, and it promotes torture.  Over at the MUBI Notebook, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has written an excellent piece on the film and the reactions to it, and I'll try not to add anything redundant to the analysis.  Shortly before the film was released, the consensus seemed to be that Zero Dark Thirty is a work of impeccable filmmaking, but dangerous and dodgy historical value due to the way it handles the controversial issue of state-sanctioned torture. But I don't think either assessment, of the craft or the politics, is a sufficiently nuanced appraisal of the film.

So far, ZDT has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews and, minus a snub for Kathryn Bigelow, is considered a major Oscar contender.  Time called it a "police procedural on a grand scale", which is true—much of the movie goes by in a dense, engaging cluster of information—but it is also a revenge movie on a grand scale.  And the best revenge movies are not just about the act itself, but how the hunt takes a dehumanizing toll.  (Think Munich, or, in a slightly different way, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).  ZDT, which centers on CIA agents in and out of the field, indicates that in some sense this is what it's going for.  One agent quits torture because it's starting to get to him, while the main character (Jessica Chastain) more or less puts her life on hold as she monomaniacally devotes herself to a hunt that few of her coworkers seem to believe in.  At the end, the success has left her rudderless and confused.  And here's my main issue with the film as a work of craftsmanship, because Kathryn Bigelow is undeniably a talented director of set-pieces.  The "enhanced interrogation" that begins the film and the real-time raid that ends it are as good as filmmaking gets: gripping, expert, harrowing.  But does she ever really sell the main character as a woman obsessed?  Characters comment on her (that she needs to find a life/get laid), but do we ever feel her obsession?  I'm left with the feeling that Bigelow is not as strong with psychology or atmosphere, which are exactly what the middle section of the film needs.

On the whole, Zero Dark Thirty is a much stranger and more curious film than it gets credit for.  For instance, what are we to make of the fact that Chris Pratt, of Parks and Recreation, an actor whose natural goofiness makes him best suited for comedy, is cast as the face of SEAL Team Six?  Or that Jessica Chastain's character is sometimes given strangely "teenage" affectations?  The treatment of her, and the way she acts, waver between serious docudrama and badass action movie ("I'm the motherfucker...", etc.).  And how should we feel that the hunt on bin Laden's compound, an event whose implications deserve serious reflection, has now gotten its own Map Pack in Medal of Honor?  In the end, Zero Dark Thirty is a gripping film by any standards, but it may be far more useful as a look at film genre (and how film genre mixes with history) than as a dramatized record of the War on Terror.  And this is simultaneously the root of the controversy and why I'm willing to do my best to see passed it.  The sooner everyone accepts that "true stories" on film should never, ever be taken as a substitute for journalism, the better.

As for the torture controversy, the film's stance has become almost a Rorschach blot.  The film begins with a half hour sequence of torture, including humiliation, sleep deprivation, and water-boarding.  Many experienced and qualified people have looked at the placement of those scenes and determined that, according to film, torture got us key information.  Others, including myself, walked away with a different impression.  And the sheer brutality of the opening scenes—a thirty-minute gauntlet that's a far cry from the dark titillation of something authentically right-wing, like 24—makes them too hard to watch for it to be any sort of endorsement, just a sad, unflinching journalistic observation that yes, this sort of thing happened.  It may indeed be too soon.  The ending is a crossroads with no indication of what's in any direction.  As with all open wounds in public life, the debate will go on.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Zero Dark Thirty is currently in theaters, competing at the Golden Globes, and is the #1 movie at the American box office.

Capsule Reviews: Oscar Nods Edition

In honor of the Oscar nominations that were announced this morning, a few capsule guides for the contenders...

Life of Pi

A visual marvel, yes, and reportedly even more wonderful in 3D, but how's the film on the whole?  At first, I was worried it was going to be a Zen Tuesdays With Morrie, which it sort of is, but it ends up in more complex, ambiguous, and surprisingly moving territory. (2012 is truly a year for films about the role of art/stories in our lives).  The necessity of a seemingly thankless framing device doesn't become clear until the end, but the moral is far more personal than preachy, nuanced rather than pedantic, and for that reason it has stuck with me. When my roommate asked if it was worth an $11 ticket price, I said $8.50. That must count for something. 4 out of 5 stars.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Buzzy as hell ever since its big wins on the festival circuit, Beasts has gotten credit (which it deserves) for being something different than the normal Sundance film, and I have to applaud its weirdness, analog effects, and strong cast.  In large part, this is what American independent film should be: not small, relatively off-beat studio films, but acts of low-budget ingenuity that make something out of modest resources.  On a technical level, Beasts is bewitching, with an excellent synthesis of camerawork and music and an insanely magnetic child star.  But the bewitchment is relied on too heavily to cover shaky writing—the dialogue sometimes goes flat, while most of the characters scarcely distinguish themselves—and when you get to what the film is actually saying, you run into problems.  Despite loving modernity, I'm always up for movies about the battle against it, but if that's what the movie is going for, the pre-modern world never looks that good, and the modern world never looks that bad.  And so the film's central moral (about poor people in New Orleans who refuse help so they can keep their dignity and freedom) feels disingenuous, unearned, and not thought-out, like an inside story written by an outsider. 3 out of 5 stars.

A Royal Affair

If the title "A Royal Affair" sounds like a blank template for the costume dramas that always come out this time of year, you're not far off.  The film is the true(ish) story of the mad King Christian VII of Denmark, who, urged by his radical physician, enacted a series of controversial liberal reforms, all while the physician was sleeping with the queen. The whole thing has a flat Masterpiece Theatre vibe (with space cleared for tasteful sexiness), and it's a bit of a bummer that the Academy has chosen to give it a Best Foreign Film slot over so many more interesting international contenders.  But it has its moments, particularly towards the end.  The last 20 minutes are more interesting than Christian VII's Wikipedia page, which is more interesting than the rest of the film. 3 out of 5 stars.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

Okay.  The acting is excellent, and David O. Russell, who becomes a better director of human chaos simply by being less chaotic, gives it more craft than a comedy about a bi-polar sports fan and a bi-polar widow would otherwise have.  (One of the joys of the film is the way it captures the dynamic of a family where everyone talks over one another, and I have to give props to any director who gets laughs from Chris Tucker by having him be eerily restrained). But throughout the charm of it all, I kept thinking: are we still doing this?  Making quirky-yet-safe comedies about misfits who bond over the course of a narrative that gets more and more predictable as it goes? And then I wished that we, like Bradley Cooper's character, could move on. 3 out of 5 stars.

REVIEW: Skyfall (2012)

It's not a good idea to dig too deeply into James Bond.  I grew up on him, and there's a strong chance you grew up on him, but you scarcely need to break the surface to find reactionary politics and sexist fantasies underneath.  And, if we're to be completely clear-eyed and objective here, we should admit a great many of the 23-odd Bond films aren't very good: for every peak like From Russia With Love or Goldeneye, there's Live and Let Die or Die Another Day.  Indeed, an argument can be made that Bond hasn't actually set any trends since the 60s, but has been more than happy to latch on to whatever is popular.  So when the blaxploitation cycle was at its crest, Bond got sent to Harlem; after Star Wars hit it big, Bond was given a laser gun and shot into space.  And so, after Christopher Nolan made dark, brooding origin stories in vogue with Batman Begins, Bond got a dark, brooding origin story of his own.  It is for this reason, as well as the fact that he can continually be re-cast and re-modeled, that this is the only franchise that I can see going on for...well, not forever.  I assume that western civilization will collapse at some point, and even 007 won't be able to stop it.  But as long as there's new technology and global tension, and men have a taste for exotic, disposable women, Bond will be with us.  So please, for your own sake, don't think too hard about James Bond—he's not going anywhere.

Following the franchise is a series of peaks and troughs, so it's pleasing to note that, after the more or less undistinguished Quantum of Solace, comes another peak.  Bond was always permutations of a formula, but the basic conceit of the Daniel Craig years has been that this isn't your father's Bond, less of swinging playboy and more of a raging bull.  (Accordingly, one of the best touches of Skyfall is that, after his own side leaves him for dead at the beginning, he sullenly goes to the tropics to drink and fuck around instead of immediately reporting back for duty).  But Skyfall takes this and turns it into backstory of your father's Bond.  The film essentially ends where Dr. No began, and the remarkable feat of Skyfall is that it so successfully celebrates Bond that it revives enthusiasm for a formula that was ditched for being out of date in the first place.  All of which is to say that it's a lot of fun.  And with Roger Deakins handling the photography, it may be the most technically-accomplished Bond to date, adding all sorts of tricks with shadows and reflections to the action in a way that hasn't really been done in the franchise before.  More than one person I've talked to has said "it's not a great movie, but it's a great Bond movie", which is a canny distinction and an apparent consensus that I won't dispute.

Now, only three paragraphs in, I'm going to break my own rule.  I'm going to dig deeper into the film, if only because there are two elements that deserve special notice.  First, I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that they made the villain, Javier Bardem, flamboyantly gay.  It's not particularly subtle, and if it went further, we'd be in a 21st century revival of the "deviant villain" archetype that makes Zack Snyder movies extra douche-y.  But also added to this, and muddying the waters, is the hint that Bond himself may have had homosexual experiments in his youth, which I haven't seen many people comment on, presumably because adding sexual curiosity to the Bond canon is so against the grain that it's easier to write it off.  Call it a subject for further study.

Secondly, there's a problematic scene involving one of the film's two Bond girls.  Here's how it breaks down.  She's in the thrall of the villain and looking to escape.  She meets Bond and tells him to join her on the villain's boat before it leaves.  She waits.  He doesn't show.  The boat leaves.  Convinced he missed it and that she's alone, she hops in the shower—only to have, a moment, a naked Daniel Craig hop in with her.  They do their thing, PG-13, tastefully lit from behind.  So far, this is pretty much par for the course for Bond.  Bond frequently surprises women by starting to have sex with them without asking first, only to find that they're instantly, invariably into-it for an is-it-rape? fantasy that has justifiably ruffled many feathers over the years.  (Academically speaking, it doesn't help that sex with Bond is apparently so great that it can change your politics or, depending on how you want to interpret Pussy Galore, your sexual orientation as well).  But what's different about this instance of Bond-rape is that the character in question has been an abused sex slave since early adolescence.  And Bond knows this.  It adds an extra element of, shall we say, exploitation and moral ickiness to his decision the more you think about it—or rather, it highlights the moral ickiness that was already there.  Sexual PTSD shouldn't be combined with screen fantasies, or maybe sex with Bond can change that, too.  Not even tasteful lighting could make it feel right.

Anyhow, this is the franchise as it stands in 2012, with techno-terrorism and intelligence leaks as hot-button issues and Q revived as a Silicon Valley-type hipster.  It's also the series at its (almost) best, self-consciously celebrating a 50-year anniversary and gearing up for 50 more.  Take it or leave it.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Skyfall is currently in theaters, fading out to make room for The Hobbit.

A Trio of Capsules: Lincoln, Cloud Atlas, and Rust & Bone

Three prominent new releases, in 125 words or less.

  

Lincoln

In which Mr. Spielberg walks through the valley of politics, acknowledging what a cynical, ironic, underhanded game it is, while still emerging with his optimism intact.  The playwright Tony Kushner, who won a Pulitzer for Angels in America and who also wrote Munich, adds an extra dimension to Spielberg's work, a worldliness that doesn't conflict with the director’s trademark faith in humanity but gives it an enthralling context: this isn't (just) a story about an admirable, mythic leader, but about how noble goals are accomplished through dodgy means. This means that while Lincoln has all the virtues/drawbacks you'd expect from a Spielberg historical piece, it also leaves you with much more to think about than its detractors would have you believe.  His best in years.

4 out of 5 stars. 

Cloud Atlas

 

The daftest folly of the year, and well worth appreciating because even its most mind-boggling missteps are so outside convention that there's nothing quite like it. It's kitschy, genre-hopping pop-philosophy on a cosmic scale—admittedly closer to Star Trek: Voyager than 2001—with a fragmented narrative that doesn’t articulate coherent meanings so much as invite us to a fun game of spotting our own.  But as it shuffles its cast in six stories over six eras and six genres (with actors sometimes swapping gender or ethnicity, for weirdness’s sake), its best statement isn’t parallelism but asymmetry, so in some lifetimes Tom Hanks gets to be a lover, in others a villain. But in any era, beware of Hugh Grant.
 

4 out of 5 stars.

Rust & Bone 

Here is a drama of survival, and a movie with everything except a reason.  Marion Cotillard is amazing and the direction from Jacques Audiard, whose A Prophet was one of my favorites of 2010, certainly "hits hard", as they say.  But it errs uncomfortably close to a Francophone version of what I like to call “tragedy porn”: stories in which darkness descends and characters are cold to each other for no other reason than to get a rise out of the audience.  It’s a thin line between this and genuinely effective drama, and the difference here is that the narrative and the meaning waver between obvious and inarticulate.  See it for the craft, but don’t feel surprised if you feel empty leaving the theater.
 

3 out of 5 stars.