Zero Dark Thirty

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s account of the hunt and killing of Osama bin Laden is a riveting telling of recent history. The film follows a young CIA officer named Maya (played by the dependably terrific Jessica Chastain) as she develops from junior officer to seasoned intelligence professional. Maya has spent her entire career tracking down the master-mind behind the September 11th attacks. Through this character, the film expertly and subtly presents how intelligence gathering techniques changed over the course of two administrations and how the operatives used everything from torture to technology to cooperation to gut instinct to achieve their objective. Maya is apparently a hybrid of Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey, two female CIA officers who were instrumental in finding the al-Qaeda leader.

The film has been surrounded by controversy.  Accusations that a summer release would help Barak Obama win re-election caused the film’s wide release date to be pushed back to January 1st, and many senators accused the film of promoting the idea that torture lead to the discovery of where bin Laden was hiding. Both of these accusations seem to miss the point of this film, which tries to provide a complete account of the actions and decisions made by an elite CIA intelligence team, with as much accuracy and as little commentary as possible.

It is impressive how restrained the film is in this regard. There are many opportunities for the characters or the filmmakers to make the kind of self-conscious political or thematic comments that are almost always made in historical dramas but that would never actually be said in real life. Instead, the film has almost no subtext and makes no direct statements about war, assassination, questions of right and wrong, or whether the mission was worth the sacrifices involved--though it is about all these things. It is a true procedural in the best sense of the term, allowing the viewer to take from it what they will.

Of course, Zero Dark Thirty is a work of historical fiction, compressing a decade of events into a feature film just shy of three hours, and it uses all the storytelling devices required for this type of movie: composite characters, time-collapsing, speculation, etc. However, it gives the viewer the feeling that we are getting as close an approximation as possible of factual events unfolding in real time. In this way, the film resembles Paul Greengrass’s United 93 from 2006. With the ability and access to information that filmmakers now have, movies like these may soon constitute a whole new genre - the recent historical drama - and the jury will be out for at least a couple of decades before we see if these films hold up under the scrutiny of time.

Many have coined the phrase “cinematic journalism” to describe this film, but I think it's a misnomer.  All narrative films are fiction, not journalism, and it would be wrong to lose sight of that. This is not to say that documentary films present the whole truth either, but there is a difference between a film, book or article that presents the actual people involved, and a movie in which actors portray real people.

It's interesting that Zero Dark Thirty was released in the same year as the equally good Argo, another well-researched historical drama about a classified CIA mission, as well as the brilliant documentary The Gatekeepers, about the heads of the Israeli intelligence service. Though Argo’s story is thirty years old, took place over a much shorter time period, with a much lower body count, and has all kinds of amusing Hollywood elements, there are many comparisons to be made between the two films, not the least of which is the filmmakers' ability to maintain suspense when everyone already knows the ending.  Argo takes a great deal of artistic license with the facts in order to make its story more entertaining and to give the audience a sense of how it must have felt to be part of the operation it depicts. Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, goes out of its way to do the opposite.  The Gatekeepers, miraculously, manages to do both; and it also provides the perspective and insight into these types of missions that Zero Dark Thirty intentionally avoids.

Of these three terrific films about secret intelligence operations, Zero Dark Thirty ranks the lowest for me, but that's not to take anything away from the achievement of this picture. Perhaps it’s that I’m always wary of the attempt of narrative cinema to present “the real truth.” When it comes to small stories about emotions, film can be more truthful than the written word, but for larger and more intricately detailed ones, print journalism and exceptional documentaries have narrative film beat in their ability to provide facts, context, and understanding. What a feature film can do better than any other medium--and Argo is a good example--is give an audience a sense of history from a specific narrative perspective, with the hope that it will inspire the viewer to learn more about the subject by reading and exploring further on their own.  That said, I still think Zero Dark Thirty is an excellent film, and certainly the best picture Bigelow has made so far. It is most impressive in its ability to humanize the ugly aspects of the War on Terror and for its engrossing moral ambiguity.