Kathryn Bigelow (USA, born 1951)

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

There’s nothing wrong with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a highly intelligent and very grown-up thriller- an unfussy, unsentimental work with an emphasis on terse, tense dialogue, punctuated by concise action sequences that are discreet but very apparent displays of technical panache. We find out nothing about our characters’ personal lives, because they don’t matter in the context of the film. If it could be described as more of a solid movie than a spectacular one, it’s still a piece of work that is striking and strident, and achieves exactly what it set out to do.

It could easily have been directed by a man. Names that most readily sprang to mind for me were Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone and David Fincher (though it sensibly withholds the frenetic agitprop and hyperbole of your typical Stone film). I mention this specifically because I recently read the non-fiction essay collection White by Bret Easton Ellis, in which he tackles this issue head-on, coming at it from a decidedly negative standpoint. He opines that Kathryn Bigelow films are being received ‘too well’; that their standing is artificially high based purely upon her gender, which may be true, but not something I will worry myself about unduly. If The Hurt Locker, which I haven’t seen yet, received an undeserved Best Picture Oscar, then it wouldn’t be the first film and it won’t be the last. More interestingly, I feel, Ellis talks about the fact that ‘in the work of Sofia Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Mia Hansen-Love, or Claire Denis you were aware of a much different presence behind the camera.’

That’s fine. But is it necessary to be acutely aware of a director’s presence? Should you always know what their gender is? I’ve already discussed how much I dislike the directorial presence in Wes Anderson films, how performative this aspect of them appears to be. Incidentally, if you had told me Fish Tank had been directed by a man, I’d have believed you, and seen no reason to doubt it. The same applies, probably more so, for We Need to Talk About Kevin. On the flipside, if you had told me Carol had been directed by a woman, I definitely would have believed you. Other movies on our list which also cover real events and share Zero Dark Thirty’s air of journalistic professionalism, Spotlight and The Social Network, could perfectly feasibly have been directed by women (though perhaps not Zodiac; I do feel that one had a decidedly masculine tone).

Maybe I’m misrepresenting his comments, but it seems to me that Ellis wants all female-directed films to feel like female-directed films, a notion that not only do I feel no need to subscribe to, but I’m not sure I fully understand. If you really wanted to commit to this, you would have to define what exactly female-directed films feel like, something which Ellis hasn’t really done, and I’m certainly not going to try to do. For me, without wanting to sound obsequious, I think there is something quite refreshing about a female director who- quote unquote- ‘directs like a man’, and I would find it alarming if, instead, all of them without exception insisted that their every film was a profoundly personal vision of searing, uncompromising intensity, as if anything else would somehow be betraying their sex. Kathryn Bigelow is making her gender a non-issue; she’s placing her skills, and the movies that are subsequently produced from them, first.

Zero Dark Thirty didn’t blow my mind; I won’t pretend it will. But it was sharp, highly focused, single-minded, and well-structured. I do feel that it has, like the aforementioned Spotlight, Social Network, and Zodiac, tried to make real-life events play like a thriller, and yielded mixed results. Nonetheless, of the four, this is the one that I found most successful in its apparent aims, and the most satisfying.

The Hurt Locker (2008) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Earlier, in my review of Zero Dark Thirty, I included it in a small list of films- The Social Network, Spotlight and Zodiac being the others- that I identified as portraying real-life events with an air of ‘journalistic professionalism’, though such professionalism does not necessarily preclude a certain amount of stylistic flourish, especially where David Fincher is involved. I went on to proffer that Zodiac was perhaps the most masculine film from this group, and as a consequence, the one most unlikely to have been directed by a woman.

As I absorbed The Hurt Locker’s first half, I was reminded of this observation and moved to recontextualise it as I was presented with a movie that was extremely, overtly masculine- much more masculine than Zodiac. This must be, in fact, the most masculine female-directed film I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t really feel that there was any trace of a woman’s hand on this movie at all. Neither did I feel that this posed any sort of problem. If I am again to pick up on the comments of Bret Easton Ellis, then I think what he was getting at is that there’s no reason for a film such as The Hurt Locker to receive the kind of praise it has, let alone win the Best Picture Oscar, when it is virtually indistinguishable from a great swathe of male-directed war films- Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002), Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002), Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005) and Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)- to name a few, which were moderate successes in their time but have now all but disappeared from the public consciousness; none of them, for instance, had any serious hope of appearing on this Top 100 list. It’s a valid point, whether one agrees with it or not, and forces a reviewer who likes this film to consider what exactly separates it from the war-movie melange of (relatively) recent years.

Because one thing’s for sure- I thought The Hurt Locker was extremely effective and I enjoyed it a lot, more so than Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a complex, layered film, in the guise of an exciting war drama, or maybe it’s the other way around; such semantics and ‘labels’ can hardly be said to matter much since both states can comfortably co-exist, a point that The Hurt Locker makes abundantly clear. Its portrayal of machismo I found particularly beguiling- it presents it in a fashion that feels almost neutral, without celebrating it or necessarily denigrating it, though there is some overt criticism of gung-ho behaviour, and the consequences thereof, towards the film’s end.

Famous faces appear in tiny roles, namely Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse. Their appearances are ingratiated smoothly with the fabric of the film, which could otherwise be characterised as a series of episodes that these soldiers move through in a short period of their lives- a cross-section, a ‘sampling’, of the sorts of things that they readily experience.

There’s a question as to whether these characters are heroes. Yes, they do things that could be considered heroic, but they’re not necessarily always doing them for the ‘right’ reasons, at least where pure altruism is concerned. Neither are they bad people, as such; there is no real rage, jealousy or malice in this movie, at least not from this American side that we are exclusively privy to, and when two of the soldiers are pragmatically discussing whether to kill their senior officer, it is through feelings of self-preservation and fear, not villainy. If any of the characters resemble an archetype, it’s this officer himself, William James (Jeremy Renner), who- at least to some extent- embodies the reckless abandon and cavalier ‘bravery’ that we have seen in many other films, and that is usually presented, with pointed superficiality, as a stirring, admirable characteristic. The Hurt Locker presents his behaviour as exciting too- it has no qualms about the viewer enjoying the danger that he courts. Neither does it instruct you to dislike him- you can like him if you want, I think, and this does not mean you have misunderstood the film. But it does ask you to consider the consequences of his attitude and remind you that the other officers in his unit are not, so to speak, ‘living in a movie’- they’re not Stallone, they’re not Van Damme, they’re not really there to have adventures or to put a boot in Iraq’s ass, they’re there to do a job as professionally as possible and get home in one piece, irrespective of whether they have a family waiting for them, and James, who boasts a prodigious technical talent along with his derring-do and backbone, nonetheless represents a very real threat to these precepts.

That Bigelow, Renner and screenwriter Mark Boal can introduce considerable depth to this archetypal behaviour is to their significant credit. We don’t really know what James’s motives are- simple heroism doesn’t seem to be the answer, and neither does ambition or reward. I remarked earlier when covering Shame that people- and it would often seem especially men- can turn to all sorts of different stimulus to plug the emptiness in their lives, and disarming bombs seems to be James’s addiction of choice, thanks to a combination of peril and the sense of achievement it brings him, the simple pleasure that comes with being really good at something. He doesn’t want to put his unit in danger, and if there are arbitrary ways he can avoid it, then I guess he will, but he doesn’t have the greatest concern for their safety either. This could be a key takeaway from The Hurt Locker- that sometimes attitudes that have the capacity to bring about great personal destruction for others can co-exist with competency, wrapped in packages that seem relatively sane, astute, logical and even outright charming.