Not a True Believer

Rating: 6/10 (14 January 2013)

Jessica Chastain is an excellent actress, but she is not a True Believer, which is what Maya must be, in reality. In "Zero Dark Thirty," Chastain gives the role her best shot. During the course of the movie, she does manage to work herself up to an obsessive-compulsive fury for the cause of pursuing and killing Osama bin Laden, but it is almost like watching Tiger Woods miss a putt.
The willingness to die for her cause, blind faith and total allegiance, held together by the glue of hatred - these qualities propel the woman of words, the woman of action and the fanatic together. That combination is probably not very entertaining. It is probably very ugly, very off-putting to the judges at Cannes, the Golden Globe, the Academy Awards. To portray the real Maya, Chastain would have had to capture and project the sort of maniacal fury that her acting counterpart in "Coriolanus," Ralphe Finnes, projected. That wasn't pretty because it was raw ruthlessness, pure savagery, what the CIA calls termination with extreme prejudice.
I thought the first two hours of this film did a good job of depicting in almost mind-numbing detail, the realities of the bureaucratic labyrinth: the carping and the back-biting, the colliding egos and the rampant ambition, the governmental anti-terror organization operatives continually bumping into each other in an effort to reconcile political correctness with justice or retribution. I almost walked out of the theater several times, but I made myself stay put and watch, because I had to know how the entire movie unfolded.
Mark Savage and James Gandalfini projected far more knowing weariness, stamina, cynicism, real-world wariness and Machiavellian caginess than the other actors; and the movie began to interest me about the last 45 minutes of the film. That is where it began for me.
The rest of this movie was not taut, not gripping, not shocking, not convincing. There was way too much slack in the movie. I would have edited it so that it held the audience's interest like a Wallenda high over Niagara Falls on a slender wire.
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't learn anything new either about the pursuit, capture and assassination of bin Laden. Feelings are not facts, but the latter are important especially on the stage and screen. Actors are professional pretenders, and Gandolfini and Strong do more acting, grabbing my attention more than the other performers, with their eyes, their facial expressions, with gestures, commanding the very space about them, and the silence and the stillness. Such gifted performers do not even require language in order to act. I saw some of that power in Chastain when she began using her erasable marker on the window of her boss's office, but I never saw the person who would give up 12 years of her life to pursue, doggedly, irrationally, like some sort of female Inspector Javert, that illusive target.
Maybe it's just me, but I expected more tension, more suspense, more intense character development. I was disappointed.