Zero Dark Thirty

This is going to make a great video game someday.

Grade: A - 
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt and James Gandolfini
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.


Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, is a cinematic Rorschach test that any given viewer is bound to come away from with their own interpretation. Some will see the amoral exploitation of the torture inflicted by the CIA upon dark-skinned detainees inside concrete bunkers at clandestine black sites. Others may see a chronicle of the tenacious, even courageous personnel who brought justice upon the world's most wanted terrorist, Some will see a paean to feminism, while others will decry a movie—named for half past the witching hour—whose notion of strong, successful women are those most adaptable to man’s genetic bloodlust.

Controversy has swirled around Zero Dark Thirty, from the level of access to sensitive intelligence allegedly given to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (allegations that both deny) to its depiction of torture (and its investigative value). There are brutal depictions of sleep deprivation by means of loud music, chaining a detainee in stress positions so long that he soils himself, and stuffing a prisoner into a small wooden box.

But the fact is, torture was deployed repeatedly, and depicting its graphic nature is not only essential to an accurate telling of this history but is itself a form of condemnation for right-thinking viewers. The screenplay hints that vital evidence was occasionally obtained from the Bush-era torture program while recognizing the wholesale unreliability of intelligence extracted solely by such duress. Indeed, the film posits that it wasn't until the torture program was shelved and the intelligence community forced to shift focus and resources toward old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground detective work that they finally achieved success.

As a CIA operative newly deployed to one black site, Maya (Jessica Chastain) recoils at the sight of waterboarding during the film's opening scene. Although "Washington says she's a killer," Maya's killer instinct is that of an analytical assassin recruited by the CIA straight out of high school. Like many in Maya's generation, her age of innocence ended with 9/11, which set into motion a career motivated by the overarching aim of finding bin Laden.

Maya is patterned after a real-life counterpart whose degree of contribution to the war on al-Qaeda is a matter of debate. Perhaps because of legal and ethical purposes, all the film's characters are fictionalized, even down to someone meant to be Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini) credited only as "C.I.A. Director." Bigelow's clinical approach creates a compelling procedural, but there's also a conspicuous lack of character development and emotional depth, unlike Bigelow's last film, The Hurt Locker, for which she won the Oscar for best director.

The branch tasked with tracking bin Laden is depicted as understaffed and underfunded, but that doesn't mean its staff members aren't subjected to the weight of great expectations. Still, the geopolitical context of their mission is merely hinted at. The presidential transition from Bush to Obama only comes in the form of a TV interview in which Obama denounces the use of torture, a broadcast that plays in the background as intelligence operatives pay little attention to it. Otherwise, the tumult over the torture program only arises during a key conversation between Maya and her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke), a frequent purveyor of "enhanced interrogation techniques" who eventually accepts a transfer back to Langley to avoid being "the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes."

Reportedly, Bigelow and Boal planned to film a far more open-ended version of Zero Dark Thirty that concluded with bin Laden's apparent disappearance into the mountains of Tora Bora. Then bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, and the filmmakers had to adjust their finale. The result is a taut 30-minute final act chronicling the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one of the most gripping, compelling movie sequences of the year and where Bigelow should have nailed down another Oscar nomination. It's also noticeably distinct from the film's previous two hours, a more more detailed and deliberate recounting than the broader, comparatively disjointed perusal that precedes it.

Nonetheless, Boal's screenplay opens and closes with acts of cold-blooded violence whose righteousness is left to the viewpoint and conscience of the beholder. The refusal of Zero Dark Thirty to take a moral stand mustn't be confused for immorality. And while this narrative about the search for Osama bin Laden is sometimes as muddled as the mission itself, its clarity of purpose is as steadfast as SEAL Team 6.

Funny Games

Mr. Orange, meet...well, Mr. White

Grade: B +
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, and Brady Corbet
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

That the so-called “American remake” of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games – which Haneke directs and filmed in the U.S. – is not only a mere shot-for-shot reproduction of its predecessor but also stars two actors born in England (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) comes off like an elaborate swipe at the common practice of reconfiguring original works to make them more palatable for American ingestion.

However, there is little palatable about watching two young sociopaths hold a bourgeoisie family hostage inside their lakeside, upstate New York vacation home and torture them with sadistic glee. And that is just how Haneke intends it. Funny Games is a singularly disquieting experience, as cold and calculating in its execution as the two antagonists. It is also gripping from the moment white-clad/bred Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet) first appear on the doorstep of Ann (Watts), George (Roth), and their young moppet Georgie (Devon Gearhart) asking to borrow eggs. After disabling George, the two tormentors engage in a prolonged spectacle of physical and psychological cruelty, all of its glazed with an irksome, spurious patina of courteousness.

The loathsome young men’s derivation is purposefully camouflaged: They refer to each other by alternating names (Tom and Jerry; Beavis and Butthead, etc.) and concoct false backstories, including sexual abuse at the hands of their parents and drug-usage, that sound well-rehearsed for some future jury. In truth, their erudition betrays an upper-middle-class background that makes them all the more alarming. They emanate from within the same carefully insulated redoubt Ann, George, and their well-heeled neighbors have erected for themselves, a micro-community isolated from populated areas and shielded behind iron gates, chain-linked fencing and elaborate surveillance systems.

Haneke turns these accoutrements of security on their head, transforming them into a kind of prison in which the barbarians are free to pillage at will, similar to the techno-terror seen in Haneke’s last film, Caché. Those girded gates become a cage, and so dependant are Ann and George – and we, posits Haneke – on the salve of technology that, in one excruciatingly extended sequence, they squander precious minutes of potential escape time trying to revive a dead cell phone to call 911 instead of promptly dispatching Ann to run for help.

At the same time, Haneke’s primary intent is crafting a Brechtian mind-game that defies, even mocks genre rules for the sake of some meta-function. All the brutal bloodshed – and in one scene, forced nudity – takes place off-camera, accompanied only by sound effects, their aftermath, and our imagination. The lone instance of visible violence – when Ann guns down one of the attackers – is literally rewound by Paul via remote control in order to alter the outcome, positioning the audience to cheer the one onscreen slaughter and then revile its erasure.

When Ann asks the intruders why they don’t just get it over with and kill her family, Peter reminds her that she “shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” More significant, on several occasions Paul breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, at one point scoffing at whose side we are undoubtedly taking and later justifying his prolonged acts of agony for the sake of offering us “a real ending with plausible plot development.”

Haneke has referred to the film as a parody of the thriller genre – echoes of A Clockwork Orange, Hitchcock’s Rope, and countless other films abound – in keeping with the director’s stated desire to offer “polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator.” Haneke reduces the role the audience to that of semi-culpable voyeur then sticks his thump through the peephole. In the end, it becomes clear that we, not necessarily this fictional family, are being toyed with and tormented. At once both brilliant and nihilistic, the real paradox is that while Funny Games demands a second-viewing, you might not want to give it one.

Neil Morris