Zero Dark Thirty

 

Dir. Kathryn Bigalow

Two films in one here: the first involves agents of the United States trampling over the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights through torturing detainees, the second, Uncle Sam again, this time invading sovereign territory to carry out an execution. In between times we see real footage of Barack Obama banishing water boarding torture and promising to restore America’s moral authority.

A partial view? Maybe. Several times the audience is reminded that these practices are adopted because three thousand innocent civilians were killed in the Twin Towers attack of nine eleven and a number of other atrocities have continued to take place in London, Islamabad and elsewhere; so millions of dollars and a decade’s work were committed to find the perpetrator. Anyone who has presided over playground fights will be familiar with the justification, they started it but less often cited is Ghandi’s assertion cited: “An eye for an eye turns the whole world blind.”

In war, what actions are justifiable? I write this on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden and after listening on the radio to a British eye witness to the bombings unequivocally condemning both the motive and the objective of the operation.

None of my first three paragraphs constitute a film review of course unless it was Kathryn Bigelow’s intention to invite audiences to follow such lines of thought. This may well be the case as this is a brutally honest and courageous film. It neither supports the use of torture nor glorifies the so-called War on Terror. The torture scenes are thoroughly degrading for all concerned and although it is true that a vital piece of information is gleaned which leads to the location of Osama Bin Laden, this has to be set against the mountain of information gained which cannot be relied or acted upon. As one frustrated agent says, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Likewise, there are no heroics involved in the depiction of the operation to assassinate Bin Laden. It is a methodical, thoroughly professional action where technology is deployed to locate and kill the architect of the mission to kill those three thousand. We are taken on the helicopter night flight through the mountains, we see images through the night vision lenses used by the soldiers and, if the audience I attended with is anything to go by, we are gripped. Or is it revulsion we experience?

The mission is accomplished. This is no spoiler as we all know the story, but we may not have been aware of the killing of other family members or the horror visited upon the children in the house. The human cost is high on both sides: I have supped too full with horrors. Mia, the CIA agent, so convincingly played by Jessica Chastain is dehumanised; she has to overcome her natural distaste for the treatment of the torture victim and she later leads her own abuse of a detainee. In another scene she admits to a female colleague that she doesn’t have a boyfriend and the supplementary question of do you have any friends at all? is left unanswered.

Don’t go to see this film looking for adrenalin charged adventure or jingoistic marauding. Both sides in the War on Terror are deluded. Think rather of the opinion delivered to Gulliver in Brobdingag:

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Think how little cause over the intervening years Swift would have had to revise that opinion and then weep for humanity.

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

On February 11th, 1963 at thirty years of age, Sylvia Plath killed herself in a London flat.

She remains a complex, controversial literary figure but there is no doubt about the technical flair she shows in her poetry and her unsettling ability to project her insecurities into her work.

Mirror is an example of a popular writing class exercise: write from the point of view of an object in the room. But few could inject such an ominous feel in the mundane like Plath does here, "In me she has drowned a young girl,and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day," And her final simile, "like a terrible fish." is truly unsettling.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. 
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

The Sessions

 

Directed by Ben Lewin

So this is the premise: a polio victim in his thirties, who spends most of his time in an iron lung, engages a sex surrogate to enable him to lose his virginity. The situation therefore is ripe for prurience, smuttiness and downright voyeurism. Except that this film doesn’t stray anywhere near those areas. Is it a sexy film then? No, it is not. It deals with sex in an adult and honest fashion: it is charming, funny and, if the woman behind me in the cinema is anything to go by, a tear-jerker.

Within seconds of appearing on screen, Helen Hunt as Cheryl, the sex surrogate, is completely convincing. The difference between sex surrogacy and prostitution is quickly established and she goes about her work with professional efficiency and care. The role calls for numerous nude scenes and her character has to be completely at home with her own body; a point made quite clearly by the scene in which she prepares for the ritual of conversion to the Jewish faith, itself a neat parallel to the process through which she led the disabled Mark. Using a mirror she enables him to see, and delight in, his own body for the first time in years.

It’s a process which the audience too must undergo. Liberal attitudes aside, the expectation must be that lying prone with a misshapen body, Mark can have little chance of physical or emotional fulfilment. Yet by the end of the film he has loved and been loved by three beautiful women. But that is not to belittle the complex interactions between characters which take place.

Cheryl’s husband is completely at ease with her profession; it does after all allow him to stay at home as house husband, and it is not until he opens a letter containing a poem from Mark to Cheryl that he feels threatened. Against all of the rules, the relationship between Mark and Cheryl has become personal; a state of affairs which Hunt demonstrates with a brilliantly understated performance. Consequently, the relationship between Cheryl and her husband becomes ambiguous: is she happy as she says or is there some truth in her confession that she has allowed things to become complicated?

Equally brilliant is the performance of William H Macy as Father Brendan. Constantly defying stereotypes (we are a long way from Bing Crosby and Richard Chamberlain playing fanciable priests here) he ranges from prayer leader, counsellor, friend and regular guy drinking beer. That he sanctions, even applauds, the act of sex outside of marriage must have great implications for his own celibacy but this is only hinted at with the merest of facial expressions and this is not the focus of the film. Rather it is his engaging interplay with John Hawkes playing Mark. 

Two thirds of the way through the film I did wonder how it was all going to end. It actually ends as a celebration of love rather than sex, but there are no spoilers in this review. The ending is achieved without over-sentimentality or any trace of glibness. It is thought-provoking and heart-warming in the best sense. But how this is achieved is for you to go and see for yourself.

All I would say is that this is the best film I’ve seen for ages.