squire
Half-elven
Feb 4 2013, 11:12pm
Views: 381
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Nothing about this film surprised me. I had seen the trailer and read the reviews. I saw "The Hurt Locker", the director's earlier exploration of America's war in Southwest Asia. If I wanted to be flip, I could stop now with this closer: "Remember that super-competent, alienated loner hero in The Hurt Locker? Well, he gave up bomb disposal and got a gender change operation, red hair, and a job as an analyst with the CIA. All the emotion is still locked up in that hurt locker, though." And yet. The film has stayed with me. Parts of it keep replaying in my head, primarily some of the scenes where Maya, the heroine, figuratively beats her head against yet another wall between her and her prey. And some of the footage of those burly Seals, dressed as the SWAT Team from Hell, slowly but noisily breaking their way into Bin Laden's fortress, is more gripping than it ought to be, given that everyone in the world already knows what the outcome will be. It's really two movies, then. The first one is long and slow and only occasionally violent; brightly lit in a stark desert world of detainee prisons and CIA cubicles; focused on the uses of the mind and wits to solve an almost unsolvable puzzle. The second one is much shorter, moves more quickly, takes place in the dark, and focuses on the uses of brute force to see if the puzzle solution is correct. The first is eerily feminine, improbably so except that the analyst hero was in fact a woman; the second is reliably masculine -- traditional war movie stuff -- but joltingly so after two hours of girl power seemingly getting whatever it wants in a man's world. Yet both movies are, as I began realizing on writing this up above, about breaking down barriers by harnessing the will and suppressing the feelings. As part two begins, Maya stands back and retreats from the stinging dust of the stealthy helicopters taking off at zero dark-thirty. She can do nothing to help these men, who've made it brutally clear to her that they are prepared to die for the sake of her theoretical certainty that she has found the elusive "UBL". Only at the end, when they return with their prize and she identifies the corpse, does she regain her position as the heroine. And only at the very end, in a place of literal solitude and military machinery that reflects the solitude and all-male world in which she's lived for the past ten years, does she finally - well, it's not a break-down, but it'll have to do. It's all she will ever give us. The torture scenes get all the publicity, but I don't even think they were needed for the film to work. I suspect they were put in for political reasons, that is, entirely to engage the audience with the images of Americans as expert torturers and to pose the question of the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation method. When they finally do get information that drives the investigation forward, it's not clear just how much a part the actual torture played at that point. And except for one brief interchange during the torture, we never even meet the enemy or hear his point of view. The bad guys are out there, to be sure; at several places they even strike back at Maya's team, giving us a tantalizing sense of uncertainty about the survival of the heroes. But mostly they remain a collection of anonymous bearded faces and quickly rattled-off Arabic names; the film makes it clear that for all her undeniable passion to find and kill UBL, Maya's real enemy is bureaucratic inertia, Agency politics, and the changing status of the War on Terror back in Washington. And that too is unspecific: the film makes no comment about whether or not, as has been claimed elsewhere, the hunt for UBL (like the original war in Afghanistan) was sidelined by the Bush administration's war in Iraq, or whether the Obama administration put more effort into finding UBL than the Bush group did. There are a few passing references to the CIA's loss of credibility after the WMD fiasco, but those are merely there to drive the drama of Maya's certainty that she's right, without any hard evidence to point to. The scenes of life in Pakistan were fascinating, and one of the best scenes is a cell-phone hunt through the streets of a typical Punjab city. I was reminded rather forcibly by the images that our wars in this region have definitely begun to take on a "movie look", equivalent to the looks we now immediately associate with films set in the Cold War against the USSR, the Vietnam War, and even World War II. I've seen Argo, The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, and now this one, and I believe there are at least as many more that I've missed. All have that desert scenery, those boxy plaster houses and rundown streets, those grim but baffled soldiers in hyped-up armor, canvas boots, and camouflaged helmets, the helicopters, the yellow skies, and always the mysterious, darkly-exotic, Islamic extras in the background.
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