Screenings

Zero Dark Thirty
Our search for definitive answers is partially resolved in Zero Dark Thirty, the dramatically satisfying (but fictionalized) account of the hunt for and death of Osama Bin Ladin. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal proved with “The Hurt Locker” that they are in the elite cadre of really, really good action/suspense directors and writers, and they top that tour de force here. Some of the scripted action has been criticized for being too “revealing” or “incendiary” or even “disloyal,” but from a story telling point-of-view, these moral ambiguities only make the film more powerful.
Bigelow opens her movie with a far from subtle reminder of what the next 2½ hours is all about—audio recordings of 911 tapes made on the morning of 9/11. We then meet a pale-faced, young CIA analyst named Mya (Jessica Chastain). Recently assigned to Iraq, she accompanies a PhD named Dan (Jason Clarke) while he interrogates the alleged Al Quaida bagman Ammar (Reda Kateb). Brutal techniques are utilized and shown in living color. The detainee is beaten, strung up by his arms, stuffed into a plywood box the size of a suitcase, stripped naked in front of Mya, and waterboarded, a torture process which makes the prisoner repeatedly feel like he is drowning.
But, and this is a critical “but,” the torture works, and Ammar eventually reveals the existence of a shadowy figure who is Osama Bin Ladin’s special courier. This breakthrough is recorded on video tape, and we watch as Mya spends a decade of her life watching and rewatching tape after tape, reading and rereading transcription after transcription, and examining and reexamining grainy photographs of bearded men.
For Mya is the obsessive Jack Ryan-type character in this story. The lowly CIA analyst who sifts through mountains of seemingly irrelevant data to find the guy who knows where Osama Bin Ladin is hiding and then be called to a table in Washington D.C. where she will be able to tell Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) that she is 100% certain she has identified Bin Ladin’s hideout.
Sonoma-born Jessica Chastain, who is best known for playing the pretty Southern writer in “The Help,” manages to portray Mya as a strong, single-minded, and brilliant analyst fueled by revenge and an inner fire to prove that a female can be just as smart, just as tough, and just as lucky as any male. “Don’t you have any friends?” a chain-smoking co-worker named Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) asks in the Islamabad Marriott restaurant. Mya shakes her head “No,” just before the bomb blast that kills dozens of people hurls the two CIA women across the room amid pieces of chairs, table, glassware and other human beings.
This bombing, as well as the one on the double-decked bus in London and the suicide bomb attack at Camp Chastain that takes Jessica’s life, are grim reminders to Mya, and all the CIA operatives that the body count grows higher and higher and Bin Ladin is still very much alive.
Bigelow takes the audience along as Mya’s single-minded pursuit of Bin Ladin’s courier begins to pan out. The key involves a deal where a bright yellow Lamgorghini is traded for the phone number of the courier’s mother. Then technological wizardry and old-fashioned detective work combine to identify a mysterious walled compound where a shadowy “third male” lives in a clandestine manner. Now, they just have to go get him, but, as Mya annoyingly reminds her boss—by writing the number of days ticking by on the window to his office—things take time.
In the end, Mya’s obsessive certainty is what carries the day, convincing Leon Panetta, President Obama, and the stealth helicopter-riding team of Navy Seals that they will finally catch Osama Bin Ladin. Then the audience rides along in a real time reenactment of the methodical and deadly raid.
As we were leaving the theater, I asked a stranger what he thought about Zero Dark Thirty. “I was humbled,” was his thoughtful reply.
 
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