Showtime

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2013)

I meditate while watching most films, simple mindful attention to breath. I do this while cooking or walking the dog, it isn't a big thing. Anyway, a recurring notion is that things are both there and relative, it's nothing new but you actually feel it happen and go away, the nagging mind as it complicates the story of what is plainly there.
So I am open to films that paint a relative truth, or in some way the mind at work. I like to think I'd be a fan of this film as originally intended, or at least until news of Abbottabad. We have a woman who obsesses for years over what she wants to be true, at the cost of having a life. We see her living inside a maze of labyrinthine, ambiguous information, framed small in front of gigantic satellite screens.
Looking, searching, waiting.
Creating in your mind the story that you want to see, a cinematic subject. Ostensibly to high purpose, but in actuality?
I'd like to think that was the film as originally intended. Then, on May 2nd, Bin Laden was reported dead. So now the filmmakers had to have closure. In cinematic terms, it had to be revamped from a Blowup of sorts to All President's Men, from open-ended examination of perception to a procedural where intuitive logic wins.
To Bigelow's credit, she masterfully handles the Abbottabad raid, with silence (bar a few shouted orders which wouldn't happen if you know the Seals), terrified loss in the children and wives, mute astonishment in the killer, and fleeting glimpses of the killing and body. She frames in the most poignant scene of the film, the CIA heroine lost and empty now that's all done.
Unlike the simple-minded Argo, there is no sense of patriotic triumph, or even much relief in any of this, and the way we experience the fight, foggy as the ensuing White House reports of it, and see the dead Osama mirrors in a way our understanding of the situationâ€”we haven't seen the body, but we're told it's him. That's the published story.
So you'll decide what use you have for it.
Pondering on this for a few days, I've decided I frankly have none. It isn't a bad film, no. Strictly as procedural, it's well made but uninteresting, even silly in spots and it lacks the cinematic space I seek in the best films. However, as a broader study on relative truths? It is both interesting and complicated.
But it isn't complicated because the art is, Bigelow is generally a straight-forward gal. It is ethically and politically so, starting with the simple fact that we got the staged images before public disclosure of the real ones.
It's still a story at this point, issued to Bigelow by an agency whose very purpose is to complicate truths. I am implying nothing beyond this simple fact, but as it is, served as 'real', it only exploits the fact that we don't know, masterfully so. So the filmmaker sets up questions, that she can dodge by alternating between 'journalism' (that we can't verify anyway) and artistic license.
It feels sneaky to me, no real use for it.