Zero Dark Thirty

At the end of “The Hurt Locker,” Sergeant William James returned home from his tour of duty and stood in the aisle of a supermarket, overwhelmed and lost. After all he had seen and done, what more did he know to do?

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal have explored this dilemma yet again in “Zero Dark Thirty,” only now we’re at the center of a cold, revenge fueled manhunt for the most wanted man in the world, Osama bin Laden. Now that we’ve got him, what’s next?

“Zero Dark Thirty” is a stirring procedural drama that examines the more exciting, alleviating, gripping and harrowing moments of our decade long battle with Al Qaeda. And because it feels so thoroughly investigated by Mark Boal and so intensely staged by Bigelow, it is at the center of major controversy in the CIA and US Senate. But there is no nobility here. The film hardly advocates torture. Through depiction, not endorsement, it suggests that our revenge soaked victory may be more hollow than we imagined.

What sorts of things can we see in the dark? We may know something’s there, but we’re not sure if we can trust it. The first moment of “Zero Dark Thirty” plays audio from September 11 in front of a black screen. Bigelow puts the fear and rage of the American people on screen, but we don’t fully understand why. Maybe something in those voices is the motivation for Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA operative who will spend the next 10 years of her life searching for Osama bin Laden and no one else.

So much of the intelligence surrounding bin Laden was based on uncertainty, and Maya succeeds by playing into that. She viciously interrogates prisoners and ascertains that there is an important courier named Abu Ahmed who may be directly linked to bin Laden. But based on what she’s been told, Ahmed may be one man in a long chain of contacts, or he may even be dead. All she has to go on for sure is her intuition, but it’s unacceptable to not act based on what the CIA doesn’t know.

Boal punctuates the story into a number of chapters that would act as subheads in a feature-length news article. World disasters are taking place, President Obama is elected, and we still see Maya stuck in her own world. The movie recalls the fact that for a time, bin Laden was not our main concern, and he may have even been dead. It was more of what we didn’t know, and along the way, Maya has lost leads, friends and sleep.

And yet Chastain gives Maya fiery conviction. She sees through the non-answers of bureaucracy and boldly asserts to the CIA Director (James Gandolfini) “I’m the mother fucker who found this place sir,” as her colleagues present the intel on the Abbottabad compound. Chastain gives Maya so much passion without letting much sympathy or much backstory shine through. Again, she’s a beacon in the dark.

That idea is what Bigelow has conveyed so thoroughly in each action set piece, especially the long Seal Team Six (a phrase that’s never uttered) assault near the end. Unlike the carefully staged chess games that were each bomb defused in “The Hurt Locker,” the chases in “Zero Dark Thirty” are so much more complex and confusing. In one sequence, operatives drive around a Pakistani city to just get a glimpse of a man who they suspect is Abu Ahmed talking on a cell phone.

Bigelow never gives us a good look at something for long, and Barry Ackroyd’s firm hand behind “The Hurt Locker” is gone, replaced by Greig Fraser’s camera that is often cowering behind corners if not trembling in plain sight. Everything we see feels uncertain, if not questionable, and that’s exactly the point.

When we finally do get to that Seal Team Six operation, Fraser does so much with very little light. The room is dark but the image is crisp, and the Marines photographed here are ghostly machines taking care of Maya’s business in a strictly protocol way. Some filtered night vision shots are unreal in the way they reveal what is an otherwise complex, claustrophobic operation.

Amidst all this crackling filmmaking, is there anything we see that can be called heroic? There are shots of an American flag, but most are clouded behind desert sands or a curtain blowing in the wind. The opening torture scenes are vividly photographed, but Bigelow doesn’t allow the camera to linger for long and let any image appear less painful than it should. Even Maya’s motivation is completely unknown. We can’t champion what we don’t fully understand.

This gets us back to Sgt. James standing in that grocery store, or more accurately, Maya sitting alone on an empty aircraft carrier. The deed is done, but what did we accomplish?

4 stars