Cereal boxes and bombs: which is the real threat?

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2010)

"Not another Iraq movie". Far from the customarily glowing advance notice that would normally grace films bestowed with even a fraction of its accolades, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker instead struggled to secure a cinema release, beset by the seemingly damning alignment with the genre of contemporary war films nearly universally bestowed with as much audience indifference as poor quality. With this in mind, one could find a particular poetic justice in watching life imitate art as Bigelow's film scraped by each set of obstacles, fighting to keep itself alive and becoming internationally celebrated with the same quiet, tenacious efficiency as its protagonists - a real life success story as moving and cinematic as any told by the industry. One could find such a poetic justice, that is, if such a romanticized telling didn't run exactly contrary to the very spirit and thematic core of the picture in question. For The Hurt Locker offers no easy emotional closure, no tidy narrative arcs, no subscription to convention and certainly no traditional happy ending. Furthermore, it might just happen to be one of the strongest motion pictures to cross screens in decades.
Just as the film goes about its business in a fashion completely unlike nearly any other contemporaries, so is the viewing experience fundamentally transformed. Fatalism and stoicism barely serve to do the tone justice, as, becoming instantly immersed in an atmosphere so perpetually tense and fraught with unexpected peril, the audience cannot help but immediately adapt the same dispassionate detachedness as the American military bomb disposal protagonists, barely registering more than a numb grunt when characters are introduced, given the chance to develop meaningful emotional attachments, then abruptly killed off over and over again. This is not to say that the viewer does not grow to care about the characters, but rather the tragic opposite: they care so much about the characters that they are forced to 'turn off', as the consistent, visceral threat of losing them becomes too unbearable. Like the bomb-squad, the viewer is painfully conditioned into simply keeping going, in what is unquestionably one of the most painfully impactive participatory viewing experiences seen in ages, potentially ever. One lives as one of the characters, and if the film is a traumatic, exhausting watch, it is poignant testament to how hellish the actual experience of bomb disposal would be.
Rather than traditionally milking the genre as a vehicle for political rallying, Bigelow dwells on the sheer sensory experience of war, the fragmentary plot whittled into a bludgeoning series of episodes, each one pulsating with legitimate threat that it could be the end. Gone is the familiarity of linear narrative and emotional progression; the film's dramatic confrontations happen without any regard for crescendo or reason, much like the actual experience of combat. Bigelow's jittery cameras and mise-en-scene often draw more attention to inane, incidental details than the key dramatic apparatus of each scene, uncannily recreating the non sequitur focus of a soldier knowingly facing potential death. And yet, it is all the more disturbing for a film so tense to feel so excruciatingly calm, with the serene, near silent spectacle of an operative clad in a cumbersome bomb-suit (an image oddly evoking the absurdism of sci-fi) trudging across stark, hazy whitewashed sandy cities towards potential detonation almost unbearable through its matter-of-fact eschewing of any traditional ploys for emotion.
The irony that a film predicated on dismantling traditional emotional attachment to its characters should yield one of the most credible, fully inhabited performances in years makes the experience all the more sumptuous, and Jeremy Renner's work alone would already make the film essential viewing. His Staff Sgt. William James is a character for the ages, torn between a desperate yearning for any sort of fundamental connection and his inability to make sense of anything in life beyond bomb disposal, and registering the dissonance through a repulsively cocky, near suicidal addiction to risk and adrenaline as surrogate purpose. Most performers would be tempted to play it loud and large, but Renner's genius lies in his understatedness, playing James as a real person and thus making his rare eruptions of constantly bottled anguish all the more devastating, and seating his performance infuriatingly under the skin - a struggle to like, harder still not to understand, and impossible to forget. Supporting Renner, Anthony Mackie is similarly magnificent, carefully masking surges of deep seated terror and existentialism with brisk professionalism and brisk bravado, and Brian Geraghty consistently simmers to tremendous effect, a continual powder keg of a performance always at risk of erupting. Bigelow can also be commended for restricting A-list actors to almost incidental and horrifically brief supporting roles, further amplifying the unbalanced chaos of the experience.
Few packages fit together with such grim efficiency and unassuming genius, yielding a stylistic feel with simultaneous gruesome realism, a crushingly immersive experience made all the stronger through desperate attempts to sever any emotional ties, all the while managing to find new ground to tread on the subject of war bereft of any loaded political baggage (its perversely genius ending recalling Easy Rider of all things). The Hurt Locker addresses the validation of human existence through the continual threat of its removal, and plunges its audience into a genuinely disturbing and moving ride, all the more through its blunt refusal to beg for any obvious sentiment. Those sneering that the Academy Awards never properly award the best picture of the year should begin removing their feet (which are bound to feel encrusted in Baghdad sand and explosive soot after watching) from their mouths now.
-10/10