AT THE MOVIES

David Begelman

“Zero Dark Thirty:” A Moviemaker Under the Gun

 

Critical responses to Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden have been a curious admixture of praise and condemnation—often by the same writer. The praise celebrates the skill with which she marshals her considerable talents as a moviemaker.

The criticisms, frequently unfair and strident, center around her being “premature” to supply a Hollywood spin on such a “politically delicate—and, in this case, covert” operation that lacks the “crucial historical perspective that comes with time.”

The same critic who voiced these concerns averred that “Zero Dark Thirty” is “one of the best made films of 2012,” adding paradoxically that “It probably shouldn’t exist,”—despite the fact that its depiction of the Navy Seal team raid on Osama’s three-story compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, was “bravura edge-of-the seat filmmaking that makes The Hurt Locker (a previous war film of Bigelow’s) look like a mere warm-up.”

The critic goes on to complain that the film stands as “an implicit endorsement of political assassination,” a charge that is transparently wrong-headed.

First, Osama was not a head of state, but a terrorist who more than anyone else needed to be taken out. Second, there was no scathing reception accorded “Valkyrie,” a movie in which political assassination was viewed by everyone as a courageous and apposite course of action. In it, Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) undertakes to kill Adolph Hitler with a suitably placed bomb. Evidently, assassination isn’t a vice in all political circumstances. 

A darker verdict on Bigelow’s film was lodged by Naomi Wolf, who contends that the director’s portrayal of CIA “advanced interrogation techniques” (a euphemism to die for) leading to Osama’s killing makes her a propagandist for torture, on a par with Leni Riefenstahl’s apology for the Nazis in her documentary, “Triumph of the Will.”

This reviewer was not aware that “Zero Dark Thirty” was apologizing for torture. Indeed, had the film not included scenes of the interrogation and torture of suspected terrorists, the response to it by those same critics would highlight that such omissions nefariously hide unacceptable CIA practices subsequently exposed by the media at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and other places.

Wolf throws down another gauntlet, and one that is as familiar as it is deceptive in its implications. She maintains that there is no evidence that torture “produced lifesaving—or any—worthwhile evidence.” That may be so. But the other side of this is like the frog who grins residually up at you from the bottom of the beer mug. What if torture did produce information that led to Osama’s death? What then?

The immorality of certain interrogation procedures is an issue that does not rest on the question of how effective they are, but how we define ourselves in a larger moral context. It’s possible to grant the efficacy of certain techniques while still repudiating them because they conflict with values that represent the way we choose to view ourselves.

Revulsion to practicing torture was represented by the actress Jessica Chastain who as “Maya,” a central figure in hunting down bin Laden, registered repugnance to the practices of an interrogator (played impressively by Jason Clarke). However noble her cause, Maya is still subject to moral review in tolerating those methods, rather than challenging them with whatever political clout she wielded.

Moral and political issues aside, there’s no denying the talents of the director and her cast. Jessica Chastain is terrific as the central figure in the CIA plan to kill the man responsible for the death of 3,000 innocents in two World Trade Center buildings. Her portrayal of “Maya” is quite a notch above her characterization as the subservient wife of a paterfamilias (Brad Pitt) in Terence Malick’s pretentious “The Tree of Life.” 

Bigelow’s movie is gripping from beginning to end, whatever the take on the moral problems it poses. This reviewer’s only quarrel with the film is a comment made by a member of the Navy Seal team that launched the assault on the terrorist’s compound. When asked about what he was listening to on his headphones on the way to Abbotabad, he replies, “Tony Robbins.” But as one character at the end of Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” observed, “Nobody’s perfect.”