Killing Him Hardly.

Rating: 7/10 (22 July 2014)

Above average semi-documentary, semi-fictionalized, story of the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden. Jessica Chastain, the principal figure, is the young agent who plunges heedlessly ahead in the search, despite criticism from her superiors who, by this time, ten years after the 9/11 attacks, are willing to let him fade into the mists of antiquity -- probably dead or holed up alone in Torah Borah. PS: The CIA, via the Navy Seals, gets him along with arm loads of documents and hard drives.
Jessica Chastain is pale, pink, pretty, and distinguished by a long, sloping, leptorhhine schnozz with a little outward bump on the tip. She looks so frail and fair that one might be afraid to pick her up, worried that one of her long bones might snap.
We have to assume that the story sticks reasonably close to historical fact although, as usual, some of the dialog and incidents are certainly fictional. I didn't know CIA agents cursed so much. I never realized that women CIA agents curse as foully as the men. I doubt that her colleagues in suits referred to her as "the girl."
I don't know exactly how an audience is expected to respond to some of the elements. Chastain's fierce determination in the face of so much male hostility sounds a little feminist. The torture and waterboarding didn't work in the scenes I watched, contrary to the claims of some of the politicians who still think it was a splendid and fruitful idea. The president (in 2011) is referred to as "a thoughtful and deliberate guy," and I can imagine whole sectors of social space erupting in outrage at the use of descriptors usually defined as "good" applied to a man whom some Americans think of as innately evil.
Kathryn Bigelow, the director, has a kind of mixed record. "Blue Steel" was hilarious trash but executed with éclat. Her talent seems to have matured. "The Hurt Locker" had its dimmer moments but was still distinctive, and so is "Zero Dark Thirty." I missed the first twenty minutes or so and was more or less confused throughout. The climactic raid on bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan is shot sometimes in darkness as profound as the nastiness it conceals.
No mention of such legal and ethical junk as flying a bunch of armed men into the city of a friendly sovereign nation and wiping out a couple of families before zipping back across the border. The history books are written -- and the movies made -- by the winners. No movies yet about the disastrous attempt in the 1970s to rescue the hostages in Teheran or a similar failed helicopter attack on a North Vietnamese prison camp.
Chastain and most of the others are locked into their roles but there are some subtle moments. As the raid is being considered, Chastain is grinning as a dozen Seals are playing grabass nearby. She receives the call that the raid is on for that night, and then turns back to the gamboling men and stares open-mouthed at them, realizing for the first time that she may be the principal agent in their deaths.
Nice job.