Zero Dark Thirty – 6.5

What one thinks of this movie will depend on the views one brings into the theater. For me, I think the “war on terror” is the gravest policy mistake our country has made since the Vietnam War. Of course, any and all who perpetrated the horrors of 9/11 should have been pursued and brought to justice (or simply killed), but that is different from invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan, conducting drone attacks throughout the Middle East and making everyone take off their shoes before boarding an airplane. To watch a movie that accepts and implicitly celebrates this war on terror made me uncomfortable, starting, obviously, with the scenes of torture but continuing through all the evidence of the billions of dollars and human lives being expended on a misguided venture. Instead of feeling exhilaration at the climactic murder of Bin Laden – as I did when reading initial reports in the press – all I could see was the incredible mismatch: 20 heavily armed, technologically outfitted Seals, plus one dog, shooting largely defenseless and operationally marginalized Arab men and women. It was not a cathartic experience.                                                                                                                                   In fairness, the movie was not propagandistic, and there was one line from the CIA station chief, telling Maya to let go of Bin Laden and worry more about protecting America from future attacks, but the overarching dramatic theme was a confirmation of Maya’s obsession: she’s the one who got it done!

As for the movie itself, it was too long. The attack on Bin Laden’s compound went on forever – how many doors did we have to see get blown up? The director’s interest in recreating the actual raid obscured her dramatic sense – another example of hewing to the truth damaging the fiction. I felt the same about the torture scenes. We got the point, and wallowing in it didn’t help the story. Jessica Chastain’s performance was more problematic. She is more convincing as a suburban housewife than a CIA agent. Maybe it was her red hair, maybe her décolletage, maybe her pouty lips, or maybe her acting, but it seemed as though she were superimposed on the movie, rather than being integral to it. Part of the problem was the lack of set-up: we never knew where she came from, or why she had this obsession with Bin Laden. Another problem was her Zelig-ness: the story placed her in the middle of every terror attack of the decade. One minute she is stuck at a desk in Washington (100+ days!), even though she is a field officer; the next minute she has morphed to the attack base when the decision to launch is made. And, of course, she is on hand when Bin Laden’s body is brought in to make the “visual identification,” even though she has no more seen Bin Laden than anybody else with a TV.

Argo is a useful comparison. There, a true incident was used as a basis for a taut, entertaining political thriller, in which the bad guys lost but weren’t demonized and the story was leavened with humor. ZDT, by contrast, seemed confused as to whether it was documentary or drama, the tone was unrelenting, and the politics were unpleasantly one-sided.