Bigelow Viscerally Captures the Intense Effects of Wartime Anguish and Ambiguity

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2010)

Director Kathryn Bigelow ("Point Break") has an uncanny ability to capture the adrenaline in an unbearably tense situation, and she displays this unique skill throughout this propulsive 2009 battlefield drama. In fact, Mark Boal's blunt, economic screenplay (based on his own experiences embedded in a bomb squad) largely eschews the politics around the Iraqi conflict in favor of the escalating madness infiltrating an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit. Their unenviable job is to dispose of undetonated bombs in the war-torn streets of Baghdad during the post-invasion period in 2004. The story's focus is on the new team leader, Sergeant First Class William James, who depends on the support of Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge who are assigned to communicate with James via a radio inside his bomb-suit and provide him with rifle cover while he examines improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Sanborn and Eldridge are still reeling from the sudden death of their previous leader, Staff Sergeant Thompson, when the far more reckless James upsets their established procedures with his extraordinary resolve. James turns out to be a more complex figure than his original bravado indicates, and Sanborn and Eldridge respond by questioning their own perspective on risk versus responsibility. A key factor in understanding James' psyche is his relationship with a local boy who calls himself Beckham because of his love of soccer. This leads James to acts that endanger his team and stretch them beyond wartime bravery and into James' obsessive mission. With visual flair and kinetic editing, Bigelow seems far less concerned with sustaining a narrative, although in this case, her own singular sense of film-making bravado overshadows the more conventional plot directions she introduces later in the story. Jeremy Renner is a terrific find as James because he manages to deepen the character's cocksure attitude with every traumatizing episode and without the need for sentiment.
That's because he conveys both the uncompromising concentration and the resulting adrenaline rush James feels within the desperation of a free-for-all combat zone. Illustrating their characters' inner conflict in different ways, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty play Eldridge and Sanborn skillfully. Mackie accurately shows Eldridge struggling to be the professional soldier, while Geraghty reflects a more humanistic perspective, the one to which we civilian viewers can probably most relate, and he is especially affecting in his climactic confessional scene. Guy Pearce, David Morse, and Ralph Fiennes show up for brief but surprisingly effective cameos. Barry Ackroyd ("United 93") is responsible for the vivid, burnished cinematography. The extras on the 2010 DVD are sparse but quite good. The most informative feature is the commentary track from Bigelow and Boal, who both discuss production details and historical context to allow for a greater appreciation of the story being told. There is also a twelve-minute making-of featurette, which is pretty standard as these extras go. Lastly, an image gallery accompanies a 23-minute Q&A session with Boal and Bigelow recorded at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.