Zero Dark Thirty versus Homeland - film review

Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow

There are clear parallels between Kathryn Bigelow’s new behemoth Zero Dark Thirty and the CIA TV series Homeland. Both pivot around a striking, passionate, slightly crazed female heroine. Both ratchet up the tension with brooding sequences of cog-whirring contemplation followed by explosive action scenes. And both portray CIA life as a melee of exhilarating discoveries, calcifying frustrations, impossible suspicions and excruciating disappointments.

This all makes for compelling viewing, with the caveat that you accept you’re watching a fictionalised account, emphatically not a precise, blow-by-blow representation of undercover operations and the war on terror. It is easy to accept this with Homeland, the audacious, hyperbolic sister of Zero Dark Thirty, but the film must equally be remembered as a fictional entity (albeit based on true events). Zero Dark Thirty is the older sister showing off her superior maturity, with an austere atmosphere that brilliantly blends political gravity, brooding scenes and scintillating storytelling.

Many critics of Zero Dark Thirty seem to have lost sight of its filmic quality in the furore around its perceived endorsement of torture. It should be seen through the prism of its Hollywood incarnation, with the inevitable attendant sensationalism and an agenda that is dramatic as much as political. And once you have seen the film, you’d have to be inhuman to feel entirely unpeturbed by its sickening exposition of a man being waterboarded, abused and forced into a tiny wooden box. The filmmakers may have had unprecedented access to the CIA, which has exacerbated the vitriolic criticism Zero Dark Thirty has attracted, but if information gained through torture did indeed contribute to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, then Bigelow’s depiction of the CIA’s methods is so brutal(ly honest) it cannot but be an implicit condemnation.

The film and the series have different strengths in their revelation of the relentless pursuit of the world’s most wanted men. Homeland has an emotional hook and an explosive momentum that accumulates by virtue of the episodic nature of its medium. It forces us to feel the unyielding pressure on its heroine, Carrie, to destabilise constant terrorist hostility. Zero Dark Thirty does not have the same level of human investment – we never find out about Maya, its heroine, beyond that she’ll go to any extremes to catch her nemesis. The film’s power comes instead from its gripping intensity. It does not shy away from the horrors of American torture, it shows the inexorable, myriad twists that undermine morale at every turn, and finally it depicts the almost uncanny infiltration of bin Laden’s hideout with blistering skill and tension. Bigelow uses edgy camera angles, masterful editing and atmospheric lighting to lead you screaming to a conclusion which you know is coming but which is no less tense and anticipatory for that.

What resonates most in both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty are the protagonists’ compelling performances and the impact on their personal stability of the terrors they witness. Homeland’s Carrie (a versatile Claire Danes) displays a much more histrionic kind of instability; her manic depression takes her from chin-wobbling lows to boggled-eyed highs and back again in the space of a scene. But as with the programme as a whole, her character feels faintly ridiculous; she gets into inappropriate scrapes, falls in love with the terrorist-come-homeland-hero Brody and veers wildly off course only to be enfolded back into the CIA with barely any questions asked.

We may know less about Maya (the brilliant Jessica Chastain) but this mystery merely serves to augment the impact of our realisation that we are emotionally invested in her plight. Her trauma is subtler, slowly wearing her down in the face of a seemingly impossible task. The film ends with a shot of her climbing into a plane to be liberated from Pakistan after the deed is done; a close-up of her face shows her composure finally cracking, and tears streaming down her face. Zero Dark Thirty may be equivocal in places, but that subtlety makes it ultimately more haunting than its TV equivalent. Both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty interrogate the Everest-scale uphill struggle against terrorism, but the film leaves the viewer feeling fundamentally more shaken. It asks the plaguing question, what is left when America’s most wanted man has been destroyed? Its implicit answer seems to be bleak: uncertainty, suffering and the demoralising prospect of more hunting, doubting and death.

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