The first 2 hours of Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" is riveting, occasionally gut-wrenching cinema as the director takes us down the long road that led to Abbotabad. The film states in no uncertain terms that torture was instrumental in providing crucial information that would lead to the man who led to the spoiled little rich kid with a penchant for headlines holed up in Pakistan, right under the nose of the Pakistani military.
The film's main protagonist, Jessica Chastain's "Maya", is a pit bull of a CIA analyst, abrasive from the get go and determined to track down the bearded one and force feed him lead pie. According to the movie her mission is ultimately successful in spite of, not because of, the foot dragging toadies around her, each of whom seems far more interested in preserving their career arc than in finding the enemy. For years Maya follows leads down one rabbit hole after another. Most go nowhere. Others lead to ambushes and betrayals. Presidents come and go. "Directors" too. Each with their own priority list. Maya herself is shuffled from the field to the office, from Gitmo to Afghanistan to Langley and back around again, never catching a glimpse of her quarry.
That sorry state of affairs doesn't change until late in the game when Mark Strong's "George" holds a meeting of all concerned and reminds them in the strongest possible terms that they're not doing their jobs. This renewed focus on the primary objective yields a tiny tidbit of info that Maya is able to turn into a valuable lead which ultimately produces that blocky compound in the foothills of the Hindu Kush where the beard stroker sits day in, day out scheming to get back on the front page.
Yet even after locating what is obviously the home of a high value target the bosses fear to tread and Maya is left to spell out her frustration in lipstick on George's office window in the form of a count of days since the compound was found during which no action has been taken. Inertia holds sway and no one wants to be the one who recommends or orders a raid that might go wrong. Finally after months of inaction the fateful raid is ordered, though Maya must stay behind like everyone else and simply wait and hope she's right and that nothing goes wrong.
The film effectively conveys the sense that the hunt for bin Laden pretty early on morphed from a mission to a job for some of the people involved. This isn't to say that there weren't good people doing their best to shove him off the edge of the earth from the get go but that the lower level operatives and analysts often had their hands tied by politics.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Where the film stumbles for me is in the portrayal of the actual raid that took this guy out. Why on earth does Bigelow seem to think it's important to be 'sensitive' in how she portrays justice being visited upon this mass murdering cur? If bin Laden were Catholic would she be so careful not to offend other Catholics by showing the event of his death in such a blinding jumble of incomprehensible cuts? I doubt it. I have nothing against being deferential to people's religious beliefs but the muddled way bin Laden's killing is handled here smacks of cowardice, not respect. After all, what courtesy does she owe him or any of his deranged, 11th century, mysoginist lackies? You make me wait 2 1/2 hours for the payoff and then essentially say that you can't show it out of respect for Islam? Or is it that you don't know what happened? Given the level of apparent behind the scenes detail in most other aspects of the film I find that hard to believe. I think you know what happened. You're just afraid. And that's too bad. It basically means bin Laden won.
I picked Zero Dark Thirty as one of my 10 best of 2012 and I'll stand by that, mainly because of the skillful picture Bigelow paints of the hunt for bin Laden as a significant career step for many involved. But I think Bigelow has some explaining to do about the way she decided to portray the most important raid in modern American history. And I don't want to hear the words 'out of respect' in her explanation.
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