Dead Reckoning -- “Zero Dark Thirty” and “This Is Forty.”

In “Zero Dark Thirty,” the masterly new movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, a C.I.A. field agent has an Al Qaeda operative in his grip. The agent, whose name is Dan (Jason Clarke), a tall, handsome guy with a bushy brown beard, subjects the prisoner to “enhanced interrogation”—a full complement of pain, naked humiliation, and waterboarding. “This is what defeat looks like,” Dan tells the operative, who is named Ammar (and is played with sympathy by the French actor Reda Kateb). These words are spoken at a C.I.A. “black site,” in Pakistan, in 2003. But most of the movie is about American defeat—the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, as Al Qaeda pulls off attacks in Saudi Arabia, Britain, and Pakistan. “Zero Dark Thirty” chronicles a long trail of frustration, leading to fragmentary gains and, at last, to success, on the night of May 1, 2011: Operation Neptune’s Spear, a Navy SEALs siege of bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, which is so perfectly executed that it almost defies normal skepticism about the way life works. The virtue of “Zero Dark Thirty,” however, is that it pays close attention to the way life does work; it combines ruthlessness and humanity in a manner that is paradoxical and disconcerting yet satisfying as art. Ammar may be working for Al Qaeda, but he’s also a human being, and he’s suffering. Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal—the team behind “The Hurt Locker”—want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project.

The movie begins at the primal moment: the screen is black as we hear the frightened voices of people trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11. That misery and abjection is what the hunt is all about. The C.I.A. unit charged with finding bin Laden isn’t just trying to prevent further attacks; it’s openly seeking revenge. Boal, who began his career as a reporter for Playboy and Rolling Stone, interviewed some of the principals involved. What we see—the anger and the desperation; the terse, anxious exchanges among agents; the breathless chase through crowded Pakistani streets—is stunningly detailed and convincing from scene to scene. It also moves with juggernaut speed. Even the pauses, the silences, the instances of reflection push the narrative along. In this movie, thinking is action.

There is someone else at that interrogation session: an observer, who wears a black hood and removes it to shake out a glorious curtain of reddish-gold hair. This is Maya (Jessica Chastain), who becomes the key C.I.A. investigator into bin Laden’s whereabouts. Maya, based on a real agent, whom Bigelow and Boal have elevated out of agency anonymity, is an obsessed woman, with no personal life or interests. But Bigelow chose an appealing actress to play her: Chastain has a slightly distraught look, a sudden smile, a warm-spirited responsiveness. Maya winces at American cruelties and grieves over the death of colleagues in failed operations. Unlike Claire Danes’s troubled, bipolar Carrie, in the TV series “Homeland,” Maya is as sane as daylight but, nevertheless, single-minded about killing bin Laden. Dan, exhausted by his duties, returns to Washington, but Maya stays in the field, along with the Islamabad station chief (Kyle Chandler), who’s a Bush Administration functionary; an ambitious operative (Jennifer Ehle); and a surveillance specialist (the impressively sombre Édgar Ramírez).

Maya’s theory is that bin Laden can’t communicate with his network by cell phone or Internet, so he must be relying on a courier. The movie turns into the ultimate procedural, in which computer work, matching photographs, and one seeming irrelevancy after another in an old interrogation video lead Maya to a man known as Abu Ahmed, who, at regular intervals, drives a white S.U.V. from Peshawar to a house in Abbottabad. Maya’s investigation has been going on for years, but, as shaped by Bigelow and Boal, the hunt feels like one continuous surge of energy, colored by anguish and fury. At first, no one takes Maya seriously. But her demands on the agency’s resources become increasingly insistent, culminating in an enraged moment in which—as Chastain’s neck, engorged, swells mightily—she threatens the C.I.A. station head with exposure for incompetence if he doesn’t give her what she needs. That a woman is leading the charge is almost as surprising to the Americans as it is to the Muslim prisoners. After all the female avengers of the past fifteen years—Uma Thurman and Angelina Jolie kicking men in the ego and other places—American movies have at last produced a woman clothed, like Athena, in willful strength and intellectual armor.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is a puzzle that keeps changing and re-forming; we’re held by fleeting references, by the workings of Maya’s calculations. Bigelow and the cinematographer, Greig Fraser, make fluid but firm use of a handheld camera, without excessive agitation, so that you feel pitched into the middle of things but also see clearly what you need to see. A sequence in which a Jordanian who may provide access to bin Laden approaches an American military installation is drawn out to a level of almost unendurable suspense. Two unexpected bomb explosions throw you back in your seat; they have a ferocious power that makes most movie explosions feel like a mere perturbation of digits.

The raid begins with beautiful shots of Black Hawk helicopters taking off at night, silhouetted against a few brilliant lights. The journey across the mountains from the base in Afghanistan to western Pakistan is conducted in darkness and quiet, like a sacred ritual. The SEALs are older and beefier than you expect—big men in their late thirties who nonetheless move smoothly, as if their legs were on finely calibrated springs. Bigelow and Fraser shot the sequence twice, accumulating forty hours of footage that was edited down to twenty-five minutes of sepulchral, green-tinted action—what you see through night-vision goggles. The raid is a methodical, room-by-room exercise in deadly aggression that is without parallel as a display of force in recent movies. Bigelow presents bin Laden’s corpse and Maya’s emotions after the kill with considerable circumspection. An example of radical realism, this movie has its mysteries as well as its devastating certainties.

“I was forty, and then I blinked, and there I was, gonna be ninety,” an old woman says to Debbie (Leslie Mann), who is herself just turning forty. Such is the murmuring subtext of “This Is 40,” Judd Apatow’s very funny new comedy: time’s winged chariot is hurrying near. Debbie and her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), a Los Angeles couple with two daughters, are hitting early middle age, and Apatow has arranged their discontents (with themselves, with each other, with their parents) into a generous and vibrant series of confrontations and fights, all garnished with wisecracks of startling pungency. Debbie and Pete are both exercise freaks, but she’s a secret smoker, and he’s a not-so-secret cupcake eater, and each indulgence is treated as a taste of mortality. In Los Angeles, time has a particular poignancy, since the body can never be young enough to satisfy an unsustainable ideal. Debbie owns a boutique, and she wonders at the firmness of the breasts of a young employee—a salesgirl played by Megan Fox, no less—even squeezing them to make sure that they’re real. They are. Then Fox says, “By the time I’m forty, these are going to go National Geographic on me.”

We’re back in Apatow country, familiar from “Knocked Up” and “Funny People.” (Debbie and Pete are the other couple from “Knocked Up,” and Leslie Mann, who was in both movies, is married to Apatow.) There is the bourgeois household, with its chaise longue in the bathroom, its iPads, its BMW and its Lexus, its sunshine always outside the window. Here is all the plenitude and warmth and the triviality and sadness of Los Angeles life. In this case, the gleeful abundance is suffering some temporary troubles: Pete is an independent record producer devoted to an aging—and low-selling—rock musician, Graham Parker (who appears as himself), while, at Debbie’s boutique, someone is stealing money from the till. At home, Debbie and Pete are running out of both cash and libido, and have begun tearing each other apart. Mann’s happy-face buoyancy fades, in an instant, into resentment and malice—the switch to a mean tongue is her favorite comic device. Paul Rudd has a handsome jaw and a great smile. Pete, at forty, is still a boy—moody, selfish, and dishonest. Rudd has been playing one version or another of this character for years, and he has some of his giddiest moments ever as Pete drives his daughters to school while belting out songs that his wife hates and eating forbidden cheeseburgers. For Apatow, one guesses, the only things that can forestall death are comedy (the movie is full of superb comics, including Albert Brooks and Melissa McCarthy) and the flourishing of his children, Maude and Iris, who appear in the movie as Debbie and Pete’s daughters, performing with all the sweetness and anger that any children might feel around their parents, coupled, in this case, with near-professional aplomb.

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: David Denby