Still, there is matter for retrospective queasiness embedded in Zero Dark Thirty. The only reference in the film to information obtained via EIT being notoriously unreliable is quick and tangential. We are asked to believe that the top torturer, Dan (Jason Clarke), is really a decent guy because he feeds ice cream cones to his pet monkeys. And by the time we hear a soundbite of about-to-be-elected Barack Obama saying, “America does not torture,” we’ve already been primed to think of opponents of such measures as interfering busybodies.
The latter thread leads us to what is in a way a deeper problem with the movie than its arguable political baggage – an aesthetic problem. At its core, although it’s dressed up as a contemporary docudrama, Zero Dark Thirty is really just another pop-culture vehicle for the all-American (one might even say Ayn Randian) myth of the noble outlaw, the lonely, obsessed maverick who has to buck a clueless, corrupt, cowardly bureaucracy to fight for the right. Heroine Maya (Jessica Chastain) is essentially a retread of the protagonists of half the Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age and a gazillion other movies since. It may be somewhat refreshing to see that one-dimensional character in female guise for a change, but even then, Maya versus “UBL” is pretty much Ripley versus the Alien. She’s just a data-slinger instead of a gunslinger.
Some of the scenes of Maya’s early days at her new CIA post gave me some hope that this might be a story about brilliant teamwork toward a common goal. Her colleagues seem quirky, a little geeky, skeptical of her views but respectful of her hard work, persistence and willingness to think outside the box. A few of them eventually come around to her way of thinking. Unfortunately, they’re mostly dropped out of the second half of the story.
And it’s hard to keep track of who’s who; one of my pet peeves about movies with a large ensemble of “operatives” like Zero Dark Thirty is that characters’ names and job titles are hardly ever used. The name of the fellow female agent with whom Maya begins to bond, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), appears onscreen only seconds before she gets killed in the 2009 attack on Camp Chapman in Afghanistan. There are actors in this movie whom I’d like to praise, but I simply can’t figure out who they were.
The problem is that the film’s laserlike focus remains on the driven Maya, who singlemindedly carries on her pursuit of Bin Laden when nearly all around her have pooh-poohed her leads. Toward the end of the tale, her dogged certainty seems irrational; it’s as if being proven right is all that she has left to live for. The movie doesn’t even begin to address the question of what it would have cost US/Pakistan relations if she had been proven wrong. She’s the heroine; she must be right. And since we’ll probably never know if such a key player even existed within the operation that brought Bin Laden down, we have to accept that premise, or else the movie makes no sense.
Chastain is onscreen nearly all the time, and the praise for her acting work is well-merited. For a character who keeps most of her feelings to herself, we get a strong sense of what’s going on with her internally, however limited her social attachment repertoire. But I came away from Zero Dark Thirty with a frustrated longing for more movies with a sense of that old-fashioned concept the “commonweal,” in which people work together toward a shared goal, each bringing his or her own talents and insights to the cause.
Why does the protagonist always have to be misunderstood, scorned and alone in order for us to think that something is a good story? And how would our culture be different if we valued narratives emphasizing cooperation and collaboration instead? Maybe in time we’d see fewer mass killings by self-appointed vigilantes with delusions of persecution. It’s something worth thinking about, at any rate.
