Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, the ambitious two hour and 27 minute Kathryn Bigelow film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, was my choice for a movie last night.

The first thing that has to be said is that Bigelow is taking on a lot here, basically our present history of the last 12 years. Everything changes after 9/11. The film begins with a black screen and audio of  911 calls and news flashes from that morning and then shifts to a spartan interrogation room at a nameless military camp where we see Dan, played excellently by Jason Clarke, administer the water torture to an al-Qaeda-affiliated sad sack while Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, looks on.

Overall the best thing about Zero Dark Thirty is Chastain. The movie is about her character's obsessive pursuit of bin Laden; and except for the end when the Navy SEAL team assassinates bin Laden at Abbottabad, Chastain is almost always on screen. She is terrific, magnetic, stunning -- all the superlatives. She presents Maya tough as nails yet vulnerable and fragile, a lonely hunter. In fact, all the performances are topnotch. Kyle Chandler as the Islamabad CIA Station Chief is super, as is Mark Strong as a high-up CIA bureaucrat.

One problem I have with the movie is the way it condenses time; it creates the impression that Osama was pulling the strings on the myriad post-9/11 terrorist bombings when I don't think this was the case. I understand this is something that Bigelow has to do to keep a narrative spanning a decade moving along at a clip that sustains the interest of her viewers, and I was struck by the number of attacks, successful and botched, I had forgotten about like the summer 2005 London bombings or the 2010 Times Square car bomb plot, but still it feels like a screenwriter's contrivance.

At the end, watching the lengthy SEAL assault on the bin Laden compound under the cover of darkness after one of the stealthy helicopters crashes, I realized that both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo act as an exorcism from the American psyche of Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw. Reagan likely would have won anyway in 1980 -- the country was headed fast toward the Right -- but the fatally bungled Delta Force rescue attempt of the hostages in Tehran definitely doomed Carter. In Argo, Ben Affleck's film dramatizes a successful Tehran rescue; in Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow dramatizes a successful military helicopter raid, crash and all. After more than thirty years, yes, we might still be wrapped up with Afghanistan and Iran, but look, we're really winners.

Zero Dark Thirty is not a perfect film. It's definitely a good one though, and it might even be great. The final scene is of Maya as the sole passenger on an enormous spotless military transport plane. The camera pulls tight on her face, and she cries. The United States is a hollowed-out power animated by elites. That's the message. Everyone in Zero Dark Thirty is an elite, from the Navy SEAL studs with their beards and keffiyeh to the CIA analysts in their futuristic "Predator Bay." Maya herself is the ultimate elite -- smart, beautiful, focused on her career, feared by the bureaucracy. The only time we really see regular people is when the crying bin Laden children and women appear during the final raid.