Jessica Chastain drags down Oscar-nominated film with a dull, uninspired lead performance
Politics aside, Zero Dark Thirty is a good movie, but a flawed one nonetheless, lacking the emotional potency it might have otherwise had thanks to a lackluster, overhyped performance by Jessica Chastain, who plays the CIA agent, Maya, at the centre of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.
It seems the honeymoon period is over for Chastain whose aggressiveness in this movie comes across as forced and overacted.
It’s a highly engaging procedural, but the person who is supposed to carry the story isn’t a protagonist you’re inclined to cheer for because you know nothing about her. There is an unconvincing transformation in Maya as she goes from cringing at the sight of torture to being completely comfortable with it. What drives her? What is her motivation?
Technically, Zero Dark Thirty is one of the year’s best, gripping you from the beginning, culminating in a long raid sequence with excellent use of a night-vision camera, keeping you at the edge of your seat, although you know exactly how it will end.
But it may be that in an attempt to stay neutral on the subject matter, director Kathryn Bigelow has deprived the film of an emotional centre, which sometimes works in her favour. There is no music telling us how to feel in crucial moments, and it’s up to us to decide what it all means.
In the hands of any other director or screenwriter, a movie about the hunt for America’s most wanted man, responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans, made so soon after the actual event, could have been a simple celebration of American military prowess.
But in the hands of Bigelow and Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty is decidedly focused on the hideous realities of war, carefully constructed so that we can decide for ourselves what to make of the ugly version of events presented to us.
A detainee is, among other things, brutally beaten, waterboarded, deprived of sleep. The torture scenes are unapologetic, unbearable to watch at times, but don’t glorify the Justice-Department-approved “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The torturer, played by Jason Clarke, isn’t made to look like a hero but like a jaded man, hardened by his job.
So before concluding that Zero Dark Thirty implies it is through torture that the CIA gathered the intelligence necessary to capture and kill bin Laden, we would all do well to remember that torture was the official policy of the Bush administration—the film only depicts the reality of what happened.
It is also important to note that a crucial piece of intelligence, which finally leads the team to bin Laden, is obtained not through torture, but through logic and inferences.
Zero Dark Thirty’s biggest fault is that it has been made too soon. Since it claims to be based on first-hand accounts of the events of and leading up to that day, many will take it as fact or criticize it for claiming to be fact.
Many from Washington have condemned the movie for distorting facts, while others have praised it for its accurate depiction of real-life events. Will we ever know how big of a role torture played in capturing bin Laden? Probably not, considering the conflicting reports coming from the intelligence community, but Zero Dark Thirty makes us question how we’d feel if it was all true.
Tamara Khandaker, Copy Editor
