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"If he wasn't an insurgent, he sure as hell is now." So quips Staff Sergeant William James after shooting out a Baghdad cabbie's windshield with his sidearm, and then pressing the muzzle in the center of the man's forehead in an effort to get him to move his car out of a dangerous area. The line is delivered with a wry smirk as the driver is subsequently being hauled roughly from his car by a nearby squad of heavily armed American soldiers. The clever dual-purpose nature of the line — equal parts bravado-fueled action hero witticism and pointed political statement — is at the heart of what makes The Hurt Locker the best film yet made about the Iraq War, and the best American film about war since Platoon.
Director Kathryn Bigelow is no stranger to blending sly social commentary with high-octane action. The gender role subtexts of Blue Steel and Strange Days make both into far more interesting films than they might have been otherwise, and are particularly intriguing considering Bigelow's role as one of the very few women in the testosterone-laden fraternity of action movie directors. Her place outside the boy's club may have its price: one wonders if a male director who made a bomb as huge as Bigelow's last feature, 2002's admittedly dreadful K19: The Widowmaker, would have had his career derailed quite as severely as she did. No matter: Bigelow is back, and on her own terms with an independent feature that cost a tenth of what that film did to make, and that is ten times as good as anything she's done before.
Jeremy Renner gives the performance of his career as Sergeant James, who is every bit the iron-willed action hero that his wry one-liner while in the face of constant danger might imply. He's an Army Ranger heading up an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit composed of himself and the two soldiers tasked with watching his back while he goes in to defuse bombs planted around the city during the bloody 2004 insurgency. His cohorts, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge, are ready to go home: both have less than a month left in their tours when James replaces the former leader of their trio, and all they want is to get out of Iraq alive and intact. It's a task James seems to want to make more difficult with his caution-to-the-wind lone wolf approach to his job. The ticking time bomb scenario is one of the most naturally suspenseful in all of cinema; here, it's the subject of nearly every scene, and is ratcheted up even further by James' seeming recklessness. Bigelow takes full advantage, squeezing every last bit of tension out of every scene, leaving the viewer breathless in their wake, and exhausted by movie's end.
Left at that, The Hurt Locker might have been just an excellent vehicle for two hours of tension-release action movie junk food, an excuse for lots of slow-motion shots of explosions and artfully rendered shell casings bouncing off the dusty desert ground. Bigelow has done that sort of thing before, and Point Break is no less enjoyable for its refusal to be much more than a brilliant, if mostly mindless, action extravaganza. But this movie goes far deeper than its formulaic setup should allow, owing in large part to a beautifully nuanced script by Mark Boal. The journalist spent time embedded in an EOD unit in Iraq, and every reality and horror faced by the soldiers he toured with comes through in startling detail. The men portrayed in the film become more than just action movie heroes. They become real people, just as heavily flawed as they are honestly heroic. James puts himself within the blast radius of powerful explosives on a daily basis. Sanborn and Eldridge must practically have eyes in the backs of their heads as they search city windows, rooftops, and minarets for signs of suspicious behavior that could put James or the civilian population in danger.
Think you have a high pressure job? Just watching a fictionalized account of what these soldiers go through every day is enough to send a viewer's stomach into knots. The reality on the ground is nearly unimaginable, and the psychological toll of this kind of stress is where Boal's story really shines, and what makes the film's quiet moments just as riveting as Bigelow's mastery of the action. Each of these soldiers is carrying around foot lockers worth of emotional baggage, pain that each of them responds to in his own way. Boal doesn't argue for their mental fatigue as strength or weakness; none of it makes any one of them more or less of a soldier. But it does make each of them recognizably human, in ways that most action films and war movies often gloss over. They are elite, and they are heroes, but they are not supermen. They are just men.
One wouldn't expect that the line between explosive action movie and poignant psychological drama would be so thin, but The Hurt Locker plants its feet firmly on each side. Bigelow and Boal masterfully take standard action movie constructions and turn them on their heads. As the movie concludes with a scene that could easily be the muscular end of a piece of Michael Bay-inspired trash, its subtle reference to a quote that begins the film makes it slightly tragic, even as the heavy rock music ushers us into the credits. The mixed signals of the macho ending, combined with what immediately precedes it and what it refers back to are expertly constructed, a final dizzying moment to conclude a film that never really lets the audience catch its breath or its balance.
The Hurt Locker opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row.
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A gung-go apology for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The unexamined assumptions of the film render it a neo-imperialist document of barbarism. Also: we're supposed to love, and identify with, a tow-headed Yank who gets hard because he's in "danger." Bigelow's soldiers, if they were portrayed from the Iraqi perspective, would be juvenile delinquents who use Iraq as the landscape for working out their masculinity "issues."
Which unexamined assumptions of the film? In no way does the film try to justify the war or America's place there. This seems like an incredibly knee-jerk read not based on anything actually in the film.
And at the risk of getting vaguely spoiler-y, the quote that opens with the movie combined with that final scene quite clearly indicate that the filmmakers consider James to be a junkie. We're not meant to love and identify with him in his pursuit of danger. We're meant to pity him just as we would someone who allows a drug addiction to destroy their lives and those of their family, since it's quite likely what his addiction to war and danger is going to do just that. The film is quite clearly anti-war, because it's the position of the film that this is what war can do to people.
gosh, i can't wait to see it. spoil me, Ian!
I just saw it. I was really impressed.
Beyond the war politics, it is an incredibly psychologically powerful film, which drew real anxiety and emotion in a way that most action movies fail to.
While I don't think this film is strongly political, either pro- or anti-war, the message I got out of the first few scenes--something I had understood intellectually but never put together--is that while we are capable of being in imperial force in Iraq, we will only be there as long as we are there at gun-point, and only if we are willing to kill as many innocent Iraqis as necessary to protect our own force.
Also, as someone too young to have lived through the Vietnam war but someone who has seen the failure of that occupation played out in countless films, it was enlightening to see the inevitable failure of the Iraq war played out across an action drama.
So, maybe my own anti-war politics are stronger than the film's, but the film does present a truly riveting human-level drama within, and informing, the nation-scale drama of occupation.
Highly recommended.