One Woman's Mission

Rating: 9/10 (21 March 2013)

The distinction between good and bad is blurred from the outset in Zero Dark Thirty. Maya, a young CIA operative, fresh from headquarters, arrives in Iraq and the first thing she sees is the interrogation of a suspected terrorist against whom waterboarding and other torture techniques are used.Initially clearly uncomfortable with the situation, Maya will soon adapt to the methods and culture employed here to deal with suspects. This, she concludes, is no place and time for scruples. Like her, the film does not condemn any of the tactics and methods used in George W. Bush's so-called War on Terror, it simply shows them and their consequences. For it must be part of an honest debate to also acknowledge that, at least when it comes to the search for Bin Laden, these highly problematic activities did yield some results. In this world, in this permanent state of emergency, the viewer learns, good and bad are really hard to keep apart, there is no black or white and sometimes, the grey turns awfully dark. Zero Dark Thirty leads to many questions as to how far a free and democratic society is allowed to go for the greater good as they say but it provides no easy answers. These are questions we all must answer for ourselves. Too unsettling a thought for the Academy?
First and foremost, however, Zero Dark Thirty is the story of one woman's mission, of her crusade to show the world and everybody else that she is right. And this Maya, no less than those she hunts, is a fanatic, an extremist, uncompromising, relentless, deaf to all reasoning. A woman who writes the number of days wasted every morning on her boss' glass door, who gives herself up to her task, who signs a pact with her very personal devil to complete a mission whose sole meaning seems to lie in its fulfilment. Bigelow does well to refrain from building artificial tension, from working the register of suspense. Watching Jessica Chastain freeze, tighten, unravel, observing her body getting ever more tense when all of her nears the breaking point, is quite enough. There is a documentary feel to how the camera follows Chastain's Maya and it completely takes over when we leave her at last and join the team that invades Bin Laden's final hiding place and ends up killing him. There is nothing heroic about this, just people doing their jobs, not asking whether what they're doing is right, in the conventional sense.
There is no triumph, relief yes, but also a sense of loss when Maya, having completed her mission, finally breaks down. Her mission is over but what has been gained? For her? For us? Zero Dark Thirty is a film that asks questions but provides no answers, questions which we might not want to answer because we might not like what we could find. There are no easy exists here, no comfortable paths, just a look into the heart of darkness – ours, society's, the human soul's. At times we might be tempted to avert our eyes, but maybe it is a good thing that we don't. No, not maybe, it most certainly is.