Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The Hurt Locker

by Bob Clark

Modern warfare has been something of a problem for filmmakers. Since the last films produced on the conflict in Vietnam, there have been few motion pictures produced on contemporary military events to truly capture the zeitgeist in quite the same way that Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone or Stanley Kubrick did in Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. David O. Russel and Sam Mendes did a good job of capturing the absurdity of the Gulf War in Three Kings and Jarhead, but that conflict was never really taken seriously enough by the public or media for any creative examination of it to be taken seriously either. Ridley Scott came close to a masterpiece with the Mogadishu sound-and-fury of Black Hawk Down, but its simplistic, gung-ho attitude found itself too easily swept up in the wave of zealous patriotism in the wake of 9/11 to make any real impact of its own, and instead has gone down as a largely overlooked exercise of substance drowned in perfectionist craft.

Some filmmakers have performed decent works by focusing more on the personal experiences of veterans than that of war itself—Kimberly Pierce’s Stop-Loss and Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones each told their own coming-home stories of soldiers adjusting after time in combat, with noble intentions mixed with overlooked results. Even Ross Katz’s HBO movie “Taking Chance” did a better job of making a sincere war-story out of transporting a soldier’s remains back home than most of Hollywood’s attempts to put the military conflicts of the last twenty-odd years onto film. In Peter Berg’s The Kingdom and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, we’ve seen the war-on-terror mined for potent, if disposable, political thrillers, but not substantial army stories. In Brian De Palma’s Redacted and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah we’ve seen the tortured lives of traumatized vets mined for sloppy shock-and-awe film tactics.

A few enterprising fantasists like George Lucas and Christopher Nolan have found inventive ways to articulate our military anxieties in the latter-day Star Wars and Batman films, but even the most intelligent wish-fulfillment dreams and superhero fables are no match for reality. The same must be said of documentaries by the likes of Michael Moore and Errol Morris—nowhere is political bias more clearly evident than in the hands of filmmakers who seek to manipulate reality, rather than drama. The films that have most successfully captured our national mindframe in the aftermath of terrorism, Afghanistan and the second war in Iraq have mostly focused on civilian, rather than military personalities. Perhaps that’s because filmmakers have taken a long time to figure out how to best portray the soldier’s experience in the transition from the drafted army of yesterday everymen to the volunteer army of today.

It’s no wonder that the most widely acclaimed war movie of the last fifteen years was Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a masterpiece, to be sure, but one that dives into the covers of greatest-generation security just a little too eagerly to pose any modern-day relevance whatsoever. That film, and the pop-culture wide tidal-wave of D-Day obsession it inspired, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days when Civil War reenactments debuted as a novelty, coasted on a blanket of yesteryear nostalgia which remains apparent in the work of otherwise level-headed directors like Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee.

As Francois Truffaut famously pointed out, it’s already hard enough to make a war-film that avoids turning into pro-military propaganda thanks to the universal appeal of cinematic violence, but the advent of a military force composed solely of brave individuals who choose to enter life-or-death circumstances of their own free will, instead of being compelled to do so by larger political agendas, provides another problem, as well, in our increasingly bipolar political spectrum. How do you make a film that attempts to criticize a war without being accused of criticizing the soldiers who unhesitatingly fight it? In Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, we finally have an answer.

Set in 2004 at the height of the Iraq War, Bigelow follows a trio of American bomb-squad specialists (Anthony Mackie, Brian Gergaghty and a stand-out Jeremy Renner) who deal as best they can with the constant demands and danger of combat in the waning days of their company’s tour of duty. As written by war-journalist Mark Boal, the script pays keen attention to the lives of soldiers and the physical and psychological toll of their job, finding exciting and inventive ways to stage both on-the-job of combat and on-the-base anxieties in ways that never exploit or condescend the lives of the troops. Wearing heavy suits of protective armor and helmets, they occasionally look like astronauts, an effect amplified by the Mars rover-like robotic aids they use on missions. There is enough presented on the screen that we haven’t seen before to excite the senses even as our intellect is probed. A sniper-battle midway through the film remains as tense and engaging as anything I’ve seen in recent film, and goes a long way to underscore the psychological demands experienced by men marching forward into increasingly unpredictable and hostile battlefields.

Bigelow has made a name for herself in the past with fun, smart and snappy genre films like Near Dark, Point Break and Strange Days. But instead of the Western vampires, surfing bank-robbers or cyberpunk misanthropes of those pictures, she’s finally found a band of misfits that audiences can relate with and look up to in equal amounts with the misfits of Bravo Company. Part of the film’s appeal is its objective, apolitical stance—an easy fit with its tale of men whose top priority is not to kill the enemy, but to stop bombs from taking the lives of civilians and brothers-in-arms. You could’ve made a film about bomb-squad units ten or twenty years ago as a cop-thriller of some kind, but it never would’ve carried the weight or import this movie holds naturally. When not fighting unseen enemies in the shapes of IED-terrorists and desert-snipers, they wage battles of personality between one another and nurse the private wounds of PTSD and adrenaline-addiction alike.

Though it runs a little long in some places, and not quite long enough in others—especially a chilling look at the home front, which captures the shell-shocked fatigue of soldiers unable to cope with domestic life after serving overseas with a handful of Michael Mann-like snapshots of everyday life—The Hurt Locker is a unique and almost perfectly executed piece of filmmaking that sums up almost a decade’s worth of warfare as well as any article or book has attempted. It is Kathryn Bigelow’s finest film yet, and more than that, a truly great war-film that doesn’t take us anywhere near the beaches of Normandy, the streets of Gotham or a galaxy far, far away.