OVP: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Film: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actress-Jessica Chastain, Film Editing, Sound Editing*, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Well, yes, the Oscar nominations are now out, and slowly but steadily I'm putting together my list of my favorite films of the year.  It's weird-I reread some of my old reviews, and learn what aged well and what didn't in the films I now saw months ago-in some cases, it was a sound snap judgment and in other cases, perhaps I should have moved the bar a bit.

It's also fun to add fourteen new movies to my Oscar Viewing Project (well, thirteen, now).  I've got quite a few scheduled for the next few weeks, and while we'll continue to tackle some 2010 films right first from Netflix (they're what I have at home right now), we'll also be throwing in some 2012 nominated films before the Academy Awards night (including 2012's three remaining Best Picture nominees), and maybe even a few older films (my TiVo is busting at the seams).

But for now, it's time to review our sixth Best Picture nominee of 2012, that of Zero Dark Thirty.  It seems weird that we aren't also encountering our fourth Best Director nomination here, but in the surprise of Oscar morning neither Kathryn Bigelow nor Ben Affleck received Academy Award nominations, with instead Benh Zeitlin and Michael Haneke nabbing the final two slots.  We'll get into Bigelow's direction, but I do want to put in my two cents that I don't believe it was sexism that cost Bigelow her nomination (she recently swept the Oscars for The Hurt Locker, after all), but instead that this is not a film that would normally go over well with Oscar, and The Hurt Locker a few years ago was more the anomaly for gritty, difficult war films, and that Oscar tends to favor its Lincoln's and Silver Linings Playbook's rather than its complex, psychological studies about the effects of obsession and war (though I have no idea how to explain Affleck's snub, which seems to be in the Academy wheelhouse, so maybe it was just a really, really close race this year).

Anyway, back to the movie.  For those of you who have been living under a rock and don't know the plot (and judging from the sold-out show I attended last night, I doubt many of you are unfamiliar with this movie), this is the story of one woman (named Maya, played by Chastain) in her spiraling vortex of a quest to find and kill Osama bin Laden.  Plucked directly from high school to be a CIA agent, Chastain spends twelve years and most of the film hunting down leads, particularly focusing on a lead surrounding Osama bin Laden's courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, in hopes of capturing bin Laden.  The film also spends a great deal of time and detail showing the many intricacies behind such an operation, with Maya's life and many of her coworker's lives regularly at risk, and we watch the dead ends and constant dismissals consume Maya.

The film, which relies on title cards introducing different sequences, seems to really just fall into three chapters-the first, focusing on Maya's coworker and possible boss (not quite sure on that one, it was hard to tell) Dan (played by Jason Clarke, who also starred with Chastain in Lawless) who tortures people to get information, and Maya at first seems repulsed by it, but slowly gains information from the practice and becomes more at-ease with the torture, which is followed by Maya's solo tour in Pakistan after Dan leaves, where she befriends Jessica (Ehle) and tries to have a meaningful relationship with another person, only to watch as Jessica is killed in the Camp Chapman attacks, which further fuels Maya's rage.  And in the final third, after sticking by her guns with absolute certainty she's right, we see the actual assassination sequence.

The third part, from an overall cinematic perspective, is the best directed of the three, and the most engaging.  This isn't just because of the excitement, but also because the first two don't have a lot of story to rely upon.  We get little in the way of background of almost any character, which is probably appropriate because these people clearly live and breath their jobs, and background seems unnecessary when you have almost no time to develop one, but it makes the scenes somewhat less engaging, and considerably more repetitive.  In these final scenes, though, we get an almost entirely different movie-a complex series of maneuvers, and even some personality amongst the Navy Seals (driven primarily by Pratt and Edgerton, and I love the directorial choice to have none of the more famous actors be the one who shoots bin Laden, as it's what you're expecting).  The fact that these scenes are so compelling (when everyone in the world knows how it's going to end) is testament to the sort of razor-focus that Bigelow uses when she's really in the zone.  The problem with her movies, for me, is that there's not enough space in the films-she's very good at overall framing of a film, but she doesn't let the movie breath, ever.  We never get to see what is driving these people, which isn't a problem with Maya, but it is a problem with Dan or Jessica, who have such vastly different personality types to Maya that it seems like they would share a bit of their lives or reasons for being here with this woman, even if she wouldn't with them.

However, when we get to the third section of the film, that direct, never-break attitude toward the screen works brilliantly.  We get to see the exact precision that the Navy Seals bring to their very methodical attack on bin Laden's compound, the never straying from the book-it's like watching a Swiss watch, but in a good way.

Aside from this crisply edited sequence, the film's best asset is its star.  While Jennifer Ehle is quite good and Chris Pratt brings some of his natural charisma to the role (and damn if that suit wasn't working for him), the film is won or lost on Chastain's performance, and this is a winner.  Chastain's tunnel vision is so realistic, so focused, that all of the big payoffs just seem worth it.  The moments when she lets her guard down, she does so in the best of ways, and not in the most obvious ways (except, of course, for the tear in the final scene)-its when she allows herself to laugh, or to trust, and we can see in her eyes the slow drain that this hunt has put on her.  Chastain physically inhabits this woman, and isn't afraid to make her seem hot-headed, callous, or egotistical (I'm trying very hard not to use the b-word here, but it's clearly hanging over a couple of scenes, even if no one actually says it).  It's a triumph of a performance, and a performance that may win her an Oscar, though at this point I'd bet more money on the more likable performance from Lawrence (always a risky proposition, predicting the Oscars on the internet since it's their forever, but I'll go ahead and do it-for the record, I haven't figured out which one of the two is better, and am still missing Watts, Wallis, and Riva from my viewing list, so I'm nowhere near knowing who I'll cast my vote for).  Chastain's coldness, her few moments of personal celebration, they're all executed flawlessly, and in conjunction to The Tree of Life, The Help and Take Shelter last year, we have yet more proof that this woman can tackle any genre.

I do want to make sure I touch on a couple of the big talking points of the chatter behind the film before I go, but only briefly.  While we won't know until the Senate Intelligence committee investigates, I seriously doubt that information was released improperly, though it is a testament to Bigelow's fact-finding and Boal's script that it could appear that way.  The torture argument is a little more sound-the film is not anti-torture, and while I don't think it is necessarily serving as a proponent of torture (we get to see the ugly side of the torture debate as well), it isn't shy about showing the, for lack of a better word, "benefits" that torture can bring to an investigation of this nature.

But I need to get ready for the day, and want to dive into AHS before the morning is over, so I'm going to turn it over to you-what did you think of this, one of our nine Best Picture nominations?  What do you think the film's politics are?  And will it be the Jessica Show or the Jennifer Show come Oscar night (or will we have an Adrien Brody situation on our hands?)?