Kathryn Bigelow’s ambitious Oscar contender Zero Dark Thirty started out as a film about the 2001 siege of Tora Bora hunting down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but as the Academy Award-winner told a rapt audience at the picture's buzz-building debut in Beverly Hills on Sunday, it changed direction in one quick, fateful instant.
“At about 10 o’clock at night on May 1, 2011 we realized we no longer had a project about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” Bigelow said at a packed post-screening Q&A at the Pacific Design Center, “because he was no longer living.”
Bin Laden’s death sent Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator, screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal, scrambling to incorporate the update into Zero Dark Thirty, a tense semi-fictionalization of the intelligence efforts, and subsequent nighttime raid, that led to the death of bin Laden. Folding actual events and real-life figures into a decade-spanning account, Boal’s script relives the dogged, desperate, and often brutal search for bin Laden through the eyes of a female agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain), a fictional composite based on real women who played key roles in the circuitous, years-long operations that sniffed out bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout.
Chastain, who was a lock for an Oscar nomination before Zero Dark Thirty even debuted, owns the screen as the driven workaholic agent whose tireless fixation on a needle-in-a-haystack lead ultimately proves vital to finding bin Laden. She looks a little too great doing it, too — a pillow-lipped, flame-haired beauty who manages to look luminous even when other characters are helpfully commenting that she’s rundown and haggard. (Offscreen, as in her new GQ UK cover spread, Chastain still has to play the glamour game, as most actresses do in order to vie for awards gold.)
The men around Maya describe her as a “killer,” and though she struggles at first to stomach the sight of a detainee being waterboarded for intel, within a few years she’s adopted the torture tactics that made headlines out of Guantanamo. Boal's script goes heavy on the gender politics and too light on character development, portraying Maya as a woman so devoted to her mission that she has no time for silly things like friends, love, life balance. She's a lone strong woman in a man’s world, an awards-season narrative that pundits will predictably tether to Bigelow as they did when The Hurt Locker made its Oscar run.
Still, the girl power moments are utterly satisfying; when the overlooked Maya makes her presence and contribution known in a roomful of male colleagues by barking an expletive at Tony Soprano himself (James Gandolfini as CIA head Leon Panetta), who can care that she has virtually no back story of her own?
Bigelow courted Chastain after watching her in an early cut of Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus (“The tenacity of her verbal agility is unparalleled,” praised the director) and gave Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice, Contagion) the film’s second strong female role, as a senior CIA analyst who shares Maya’s drive to unearth bin Laden. “The women don’t define themselves through men,” Bigelow said, “other than one man.” (Chastain credited another behind the scenes presence, producer Megan Ellison, with first introducing her to the project.)
The film was intensely shrouded in secrecy, even beyond most Hollywood norms, for good reason; Boal and Bigelow, who had been accused of receiving improper access to information from the Obama administration as research for Zero Dark Thirty, intentionally kept details of their bin Laden project under lock and key. Scripts were doled out sparsely among the cast so selectively that Chastain admitted she’d snuck other actors into her hotel room to read her copy of the screenplay.
“We became a political talking point and the subject of various inquiries,” said Boal. “It was an election year and there was pressure to use the movie… but the speculation was ill-informed, if not totally wrong.”
Zero Dark Thirty is much more about the personal than the political, anyhow. “There hasn’t been much in the public record about what the people were like,” said Boal of the real life figures represented in the film. But the tragedy of 9/11 and of other terrorist attacks around the globe and the desire to bring an end to bin Laden’s global network also belongs to those in the audience, watching along as Bigelow and Boal reenact a decade of our collective fears and anxieties leading up to one of the most heavily covered world news events in modern history.
In exploring the extraordinary experience of those involved in the hunt for bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty opens a door to examining our own need for justice as witnesses and survivors, at almost any cost. Its most difficult scene to watch comes early on, as Maya’s senior officer — played by an excellent Jason Clarke, who's capable of switching from brutality to kindness on a dime — brutalizes a prisoner (A Prophet's Reda Kateb) believed to have information related to a terrorist operation. The film doesn’t judge either torturer or torturee, allowing both men a fully-fledged and complex humanity of their own, but it does make a case for psychological and physical torture as a necessary evil in times of war.
Later as the assault on bin Laden’s compound unfolds in the dead of night (photographed impressively, and almost entirely in gradations of shadows and dark, by Greig Fraser) the matter-of-fact depiction of the Navy SEAL operation unfolds in a hushed, eerie quiet. For anyone who was up late monitoring Twitter feeds and news accounts of that night in Abottabad, or pored over accounts that trickled out in the subsequent days and weeks, watching it recreated onscreen is transfixing — the accidental crash of a secret military stealth chopper, the super-powered soldier dog who accompanied the SEALs, and the unreal matter-of-factness of how bin Laden was shot, unarmed, by soldiers who almost couldn’t believe they’d bagged Public Enemy #1, and died from a head wound in a bedroom fifteen minutes after the start of the attack.
As alarming as it is to recognize the entertainment value in seeing men and women shot one by one in their home in front of their children, or watch soldiers celebrate their kills for the greater good, Boal said they wanted to make a movie that would “capture a moment in time, and also stand up to time.” In offering a relatively cold look at the gray-hued morality of being on the right side of justice, where the wrong hunch could irreparably destroy international relations and a presidency, not to mention innocent lives — but the collective hurt demands retribution and closure — Zero Dark Thirty does just that.
Zero Dark Thirty is in theaters December 19; read more here.