It's been a long time since Jamie Lee Curtis fought her way onto the police force and battled a violent psychopath in Blue Steel, and, while Kathryn Bigelow (who wrote the screenplay for that film) has continued to grow as a filmmaker (and win Oscars), the story of a bright and fierce professional woman like Jessica Chastain's Maya remains something Bigelow always seemed primed to make, though committed to forever avoid. Thankfully, she finally found a truly feminist story she couldn't resist telling. The triumph of Zero Dark Thirty is not in its historicity; it's in the fantastic characterization of its protagonist.
Zero Dark Thirty shouldn't be taken as history any more than should Django Unchained. Both films are menacing, violent portraits of the artists behind the camera. I came at Zero Dark Thirty from the perspective of a pro-Obama, anti-torture liberal, and I didn't find my political views echoed in everything on the screen. But that's okay. I think I would disagree with Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal about the efficacy of torture (or the morality of it even if it did produce results), but at least the film portrays it as appropriately sickening and corrosive to the mental health of those involved.
Violence is never enjoyed or celebrated in Zero Dark Thirty, as it is in films like Django Unchained and Gangster Squad. Even when soldiers storm the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Bigelow puts painful emphasis on the crying children whose fathers and mothers are being executed.
Yet as horrible as the violence is, Maya and the filmmakers never flinch. A detainee looks to Maya at one point for mercy and finds none. Yet Maya is not cold; her strength is shown in how much the torture actually does bother her. She pushes through it in order to do the job she feels she must. Chastain lets just enough emotion spill out to convey humanity but not fragility. When senior officials struggle with the decision to launch a strike on the compound, given imperfect evidence yet again, they uneasily move forward in large part due to Maya's confidence. It's a decision that's beautifully problematized; after the debacle of finding no WMDs in Iraq, no one wants to trust imperfect intelligence, but that's exactly what they're forced to do. Zero Dark Thirty is often a film about the discomfort of finding your imperfect self perfectly capable of executing a task of dubious morality.
Somber and complicated, Zero Dark Thirty never sells Maya out with pratfalls or cute klutziness or asinine girlishness. Contrast Maya with Aaron Sorkin's female characters in his recent HBO show The Newsroom: Sorkin's characters can't get past the soap opera silliness of their personal lives, but, as Maya puts it, she is "not the girl who fucks." The lack of any romantic subplot in Zero Dark Thirty reminds me of Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs--driven, professional, and human. There are too few female roles like these.
It's not a perfect film; I doubt it would work at all for someone who hadn't lived through the last decade. It exists within our present history and cannot escape it, and yet it is not a documentary. The disingenuous comments of the filmmakers that it is somehow a journalistic portrayal of events rubs me the wrong way. It's hard to tell the truth in a documentary, let alone a re-shaped fictionalization such as Zero Dark Thirty.
Still, I'm glad Bigelow made a serious film with a female protagonist. Though it likely won't win the accolades Bigelow's last military opus did, this film feels much more personal and artistic to me than the underwhelming and over-praised Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty leans to the political right, but I don't care--it has a strong, intelligent, female point of view, and in these days of Sarah Palin and Sorkin-esque executive bimbos, that's something worth celebrating, no matter from which side of the aisle the voice originates.
Film Stack Rating: 4/5
Zero Dark Thirty is rated R for scenes of torture, violence, and strong language.
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