Kathryn Bigelow’s intelligence thriller is tense, patient and worth the effort, with Jessica Chastain holding it together. Its handling of torture is harder to accept, particularly when the filmmaking makes everything seem so matter-of-fact.
A long intelligence investigation is an awkward subject for a thriller: repetition matters, progress is uncertain, and much of the work consists of deciding what information to believe. Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal take that difficulty seriously in Zero Dark Thirty, following the search for Osama bin Laden through the increasing fixation of CIA operative Maya. It is an engrossing film, particularly good at making concentration and persistence dramatic. Our reservation is substantial: the film does too little to question the place of torture in the investigation.
Bigelow begins with a black screen and audio from 9/11, giving us nothing to look at while establishing the reason for the pursuit. We were shaken by that opening; having no image to examine made listening feel inescapable. The scenes of prisoner abuse receive the same sober attention as the intelligence work. Jason Clarke is disturbing as Dan because his performance makes the cruelty feel routine. Bigelow keeps the discomfort in view without interrupting the film to explain it.
Jessica Chastain gives Maya’s single-mindedness enough force to carry a film that keeps personal history at a distance. Her concentration holds our attention, and she allows the determination to become wearing without making the character tiresome. There is no need to make Maya charming, and Chastain wisely does not try. Boal’s emphasis on one exceptional operative does, however, narrow the account of a much larger effort. The familiar thriller heroine who believes harder than everybody else threatens to take over a film otherwise so attentive to the ordinary labour of intelligence.
Greig Fraser’s photography is hardest to look at during the prisoner abuse, because its clarity leaves so little distance between us and what is happening. The images never suggest that a well-composed frame will make the material easier to bear. Jeremy Hindle’s production design makes the intelligence operation feel like somewhere people endure long working days. That is a useful contribution to a thriller so dependent on believing in the routine.
Editors Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg give the accumulation of information a firm forward movement, while leaving enough repetition to register the effort involved. At 157 minutes, the film earns most of its length by making the search feel protracted without letting the storytelling become shapeless. When attention shifts towards action, the pleasures become more conventional, though the staging remains clear and the cutting precise. Alexandre Desplat’s music helps sustain the unease. It is effective support, but Bigelow gets so much tension from people attending closely to their work that the score scarcely needs to persuade us.
The difficulty with Boal’s account is how readily the cruelty becomes part of the job we have been encouraged to follow so intently. A procedural asks us to connect methods with results, and we found the film too willing to let its forward movement carry us past questions about what the abuse achieves. Bigelow avoids giving us a speech that settles the matter, but that does not make the account neutral. We remain close to the people pursuing bin Laden, sharing their impatience and investing in their work, with too little encouragement to question their assumptions. Give it an uninterrupted evening, but leave time afterwards to argue about what it has asked us to accept.
