Even before its release, Zero Dark Thirty was courting controversy: does it glorify torture, was the Obama administration a little too florid in its support to the filmmakers, does Kathryn Bigelow get more credit than she deserves because she's a female filmmaker? At least two out of three of those questions maybe valid, but I think Zero Dark Thirty cements Bigelow's reputation as a solid, and solidly audacious, filmmaker.
At the very least, I doubt many directors could have delivered this story with the same sense of clinical detachment as Bigelow. As evidenced when Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011, there's still a lot of emotion around this man, and his actions in directing and planning the attacks of September 11, 2001, so to make a film about his pursuit so unemotionally is an act of incredible restraint on her part. In truth, I think reaction to this film is a lot more visceral than people would like to admit. The film is emotionless, but the reaction to it is not, and there in lies the real drama of Zero Dark Thirty.
The film tracks the 10 year long manhunt for bin Laden through the eyes of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA analyst whose first and only assignment has been the tracking of bin Laden. The story follows Maya through various locales across the Middle East. Encountering difficulty in tracking suspects and getting those already captured to talk, Maya bears witness to the dark side of working for intelligence including the extraordinary rendition of detainees (meaning: torture).
Drawing upon the incredible real life events, the film does an impressive job of condensing a decade long story into a two and a half hour movie without losing any of the potency or complexity of the story. Bigelow smartly doesn't make the film about patriotism, revenge or any other emotional response, but instead sells the film like a detective's story: there's the search for clues, the questioning of witnesses, and the double-dealing with unsavory characters.
The geopolitics are almost a secondary consideration. Yes, the torture scenes make you uneasy, but only more so because you know this is based on something real as opposed to the more fictionalized torture on something like the TV series 24. I can understand the perception that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture, but I think using the same parameters you can also say that it makes the case that the Afghan invasion worked, or that the U.S. sojourn into Iraq had no impact whatsoever on the mission. In fact, there's nothing political at all in the film, not just any indictment one way or the other on torture, but for that matter the times when U.S. politicians suggested that bin Laden was no longer a factor in the War on Terror.
So instead, Zero Dark Thirty focuses on the fact of the manhunt, and the psychological and emotional toll of the people doing the hunting. While some of the people involved have to bow out for whatever reason along the way, Maya's confidence and commitment holds through every challenge, but is she driven out of duty? Is just unable to leave a job have finished? Her motivations are at best unclear, but her desire to get bin Laden is unquestionable, and she is unquestionably driven. Chastain is really good at playing her cards too close to her chest and she provides actual, subtle hints of emotion in the midst of Bigelow's cold pursuit of the story.
But I'm not sure how much Zero Dark Thirty is occupied with those human factors, and human feelings. If the movie feels like an endorsement of torture, it's only because the film is clinical in how it's presented, not in providing the torturers complex motivation, satisfaction or regret. Bigelow was probably walking a fine line here, she didn't want the film, I think, to look like it was directed by Michael Bay or some other schlock or hokey filmmaker. She didn't want the moment that Seal Team Six killed bin Laden to be a cheering moment and instead be seen as the inevitable result of the work of some many people dedicated to a single goal. Zero Dark Thirty is a master class in restraint, which is too bad it will be remembered mostly for the torture.
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