Arguably the most incendiary scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, the remarkable new film from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, are in the very opening shots. The image of a political prisoner suspended from the ceiling by chains and subjected to waterboarding has incited a flurry of controversy across a range of both media and political platforms, establishing itself as a lightning rod for the discussion of torture’s role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the ethics of using such methods at all.
The fierce debate over whether or not the film is pro-torture has, however, served to obscure the undeniable mastery of the film itself. Bridging the gap between journalism and fiction, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have succeeded in creating a riveting narrative of one of the most compelling political stories in post-9/11 America.
Anchored by the quiet authority of Jessica Chastain’s performance as Maya, a CIA analyst and woman possessed by the hunt for bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty fills the template of a detective story while never skimping on the human elements of the hunt. When we first meet Maya, she is a green recruit hanging in the shadows of a dank cell in Pakistan, cringing and looking on as a detainee is pressed for details and names of top al-Qaeda officials. When a name is finally produced, the film surges into its principal act and Maya takes center stage—tenacious and unrelenting in her quest, she is an undeniably strong character, though she never reveals quite enough weakness to be truly believable. Instead, she embodies a caricature of a strong female character.
With a mane of red hair and an unwavering stare, she is an intimidating yet mysterious figure—“Washington says she’s killer,” says a CIA officer played by Jason Clarke. This hard exterior, though becoming occasionally vulnerable to cracks as the plot takes unexpected turns, never falls away to reveal human foibles and idiosyncrasies—in short, though a character that demands attention, Maya never manages to be relatable. Confident, forthright, and obstinate in her attempts to convince her superiors of her lead’s viability, she is more of a vehicle to drive the film’s plot than the center of its narrative.
Though the search for the man most wanted by the American government is drawn out over years of trial and error, the film condenses the time lapse into a string of events punctured by terrorist attacks in London and throughout the Middle East. While these are necessary interjections, however, they merely constitute the background of what Bigelow and Boal seek to portray as a daily struggle for CIA analysts and other intelligence officers behind the scenes. Ceaselessly laboring behind the glow of her laptop screen and pressuring her superiors to take her mission seriously, Maya embodies the faceless force behind the mission.
As her goal of finding bin Laden comes closer to its achievement, the film accordingly ramps up the tension. The cinematography is dominated by a night vision lens as Black Hawk helicopters lands in bin Laden’s Abbottabad complex, and the hunt finally comes to its conclusion. The line between truth and fiction is never clarified, yet it’s this capacity for debate that makes Zero Dark Thirty an undeniable arena for wonder and questioning.
