‘Zero Dark Thirty’

I chewed my nails and broke a sweat watching Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” one of the darkest, most suspenseful films of the year. It is Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s follow-up to their 2009 hit, “The Hurt Locker,” which won Bigelow her first directing Oscar, Mark Boal his first screenwriting Oscar and the movie Best Picture.

I don’t predict “Zero Dark Thirty” to be quite as successful, but for all it’s worth, this taut thriller about the decade-long events leading up to killing of Osama Bin Laden by a Navy S.E.A.L. team manages to chill your blood and raise your heart rate. In another excellent performance in an already impressive career, Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a character based on the woman who was the brains behind the entire operation.

In the film, there is a scene where she stands in a meeting room with fellow C.I.A. agents and their director (James Gandolfini), who asks for percentages of confidence that Bin Laden is in fact living inside a large, heavily surveyed compound nearby the Pakistan Military Academy. On the table the agents are standing around is a model of the compound and its surrounding geography. Everyone but Maya seems to think there is a 50/50 chance that Bin Laden is inside the compound. Maya says she is 100 percent sure. This is the place, and she knows it.

This scene, in part, defines what “Zero Dark Thirty” is interested in showing, Maya’s long and painful struggle to convince everyone of her confidence. She becomes obsessed with finding the man behind the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and devotes her life, and often risks it, to get the job done. There are some harrowing scenes of torture, which have come under much scrutiny by critics who say they glorify or misrepresent the truth.

From my perspective, they are a vital part of the film, and go a long way toward lending hard gravity to the film’s final shot. There is not a doubt in my mind that the C.I.A. has tortured, and in trying to learn Bin Laden’s location, I cannot help but believe at least the essence of what went on post-9/11 is reflected on screen here by the filmmakers. They are difficult to watch at times, but as parts of a whole they are necessary to the story — after all, this is a story based on true events, not a documentary feature.

As in “The Hurt Locker,” there are long periods of silence and waiting in “Zero Dark Thirty,” punctuated by scenes of quick, blood-curdling violence and action. Bigelow’s direction is not as stylish as David Fincher’s, but the overall pacing of this film is reminiscent of Fincher’s “Zodiac,” in that it tracks the search for one man over the course of many years and captures the obsession that develops in the course of trying to do so. “Zero Dark Thirty” is the lesser film for a lot of reasons, including some editing issues that rob a number of scenes of suspense, and an annoying, inconsistent series of title cards that seem redundant in hindsight, and unnecessarily split of segments of the movie.

The final 30 minutes of “Zero Dark Thirty” alone are worth the price of admission for this movie, as they capture the actual storming and killing of Bin Laden. No spoiler here, we all know he is killed at the end, so all that remains is the execution of the sequence, and Bigelow directs the hell out of it. A lot of silence and pure suspense, punctuated by some truly jarring explosions, all shot in night vision, leads up to what can only be described as the ultimate anti-climax, but that is the exact ending this film needed to prove the point it is trying to make. The amount of violence, torture, interrogation, death, tears and political tactics that went on between the 9/11 attacks and the actual death of Bin Laden leaves Maya and all of us thinking, what now?

It is a far more bittersweet, morally ambiguous ending than a lot of filmmakers would have approached, and that is why Bigelow and Boal are a great pairing. They take incredibly controversial subject material and, after Hollywood churned out a series of failed, preachy Iraq war movies, they made “The Hurt Locker.” Now, they have made “Zero Dark Thirty,” and once again they get it right, more or less.

★★★ (out of 4)