FILM: Zero Dark Thirty

Is it fiction!  It’s based on true facts! Is it a documentary?   No, it’s not all based on facts. It’s art.  The torture scenes - who knows? It’s an advocate for the use of torture? No, it’s a provocative inquiry. It’s a procedural?  Yes, but it’s ..."a unique kind of motion picture: the reported film”. (press notes quoted by Kenneth Turan). It’s gripping important entertainment.  

The film fills a deep fly on the wall curiosity.  Where was the scene in which Obama ordered the hit? How did they get the rest of the women and children out?

The storyline is grindingly propelled forward by the dedication of the CIA and Maya, the main character, to capture Bin Laden.  It’s tense and engrossing, naturalistic and yet heightened.  Maya is an amalgam of several real persons, supposedly.  Here she is written marble. However,  Jessica Chastain’s luminous face and expressions are revealing of a refined, elegant, and steel-boned woman. She  does a soldier’s duty, even as she shoves snacks into her mouth while deeply focussed on her work. She remains consummately professional.  No tell all, no talk shows.  

I’d like to think she/they are still working to stabilize North Africa and the Middle East as we speak.

After Secretary of State Clinton’s testimony yesterday about the raid in Libya, concerns about combatting terrorist activity and Al Quaeda make the film even more timely. The nightmare is not over.

“Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein has denied that waterboarding helped in this case. This is a movie that claims to be faithfully based on facts, but the filmmakers can't have it both ways....There's an emotional detachment to the film that undercuts its potency. Zero Dark Thirty is more technically proficient than emotionally involving.” - Claudia Puig review

“.Movies must move, and this one just lies there like a stack of paper from a classified government filing cabinet...The conceit of the movie is that it was one woman with a driving passion—and a young, inexperienced field operative to boot—who practically single-handedly discovered the evidence and masterminded the plan that led to bin Laden’s assassination. We know nothing about Maya, and Ms. Chastain’s stoic, textbook approach to the role does nothing to illuminate or enlighten.” - Rex Reed

“...This is the work of a commanding filmmaker who is willing, as well as able, to confront a full spectrum of moral ambiguity. It is also, ... the subject of ...controversy... in which the film's sternest critics see it as factually flawed and an apology for torture.

..."Zero Dark Thirty" does not apologize for torture, any more than it denounces it. What it does in the course of telling a seminal story of our time is what contemporary films so rarely do, serve as brilliant provocation. - Joel Morgenstern, WSJ