A preface--I apologize that the gaps between posts have been regrettably long, and it hurts me to think of the legions of fans checking this blog nightly, hoping for the companionship of another adroit entry--and having only disappointment follow them into sleep. Know, o ye faithful, that it only reflects the gaps between my own opportunities to see new releases. An unfortunate combination of being extremely busy and broke as shit has contributed to the delinquency of my output. And so, I offer this humble benefaction.
Kathryn Bigelow directed a series of commercially successful action movies in the eighties and nineties, most notably Point Break, which I've not seen but is frequently referenced as showing Keanu Reeves at his most absurdly stone-faced finest. I also know that it's about bank robbing surfers. This is not a dismissive write-off--I'm just trying to frame The Hurt Locker within the context of Bigelow's other films. The woman honed her skills making big-budget thrillers. And hone them she did--The Hurt Locker proves, as does Star Trek for J.J. Abrams, that the craftsmanship of directing is timeless and universal, regardless of the genre in which they are applied.
The film centers around several weeks in the life of Bravo Company, a bomb squad assigned to defuse IEDs around Baghdad. Yeah, we've all had shitty jobs. The film opens with Bravo Company in its first iteration--Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and team leader Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce). During an apparently routine defusing of a roadside bomb, their remote-controlled rover fails, so Thompson dons the imposing shrapnel suit and goes in himself. Eldridge notices a bystander holding a cell-phone--sudden panic--the bystander punches in a few numbers on the phone and the bomb detonates. Bigelow films the explosion in grotesquely beautiful slow motion--jutting spires of gravel, the jump of sand underfoot, and Thompson blasted to the ground, his otherworldly shrapnel suit rendered useless by the sheer force of the explosion.
Thompson is replaced by Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) a competent but frequently reckless hotshot who chafes against the nervous precision of Sergeant Sanborn. The film unfolds from there in a series of episodes that make up the waning days of Bravo Company's assignment. Another roadside bomb. A car bomb left in a parking lot. A man who's had explosives chained to his body. In each situation, the tension is excruciating, and tiresome in its repetitiveness...and yet no less intense for its repetition. The proximity of death is horrifying--there is absolutely no safety net for these guys apart from their own wits and presence of mind, and they leave each morning knowing full well the high likelihood that they will die. The bombs are innocuous metal tubes, just one more piece of filthy detritus in the dry streets of this ruined city, and yet the knowledge of the force contained within each--and that it could quite possibly blow at any moment--makes the stillness of these worn metal shells all the more threatening.
And as the company faces these threats every day, bystanders look on, each one possibly carrying the detonator. In one scene, James hurries to defuse a car bomb while Sanborn and Eldridge cover him from the top of the surrounding buildings. A man across the street films them on a camcorder. Is he just interested in what the Americans are doing, or is he assigned to record for posterity their imminent fiery death? Three men stand at the top of a nearby minaret. Are those hand signals to the cameraman?
A later scene involves Sanborn and James in a sniper battle with a group of militants holed up in a distant bunker. The tension is unchanged by the variance in weaponry. The barrel moving a few millimeters left or right is the difference between life or death, and both Sanborn and his opponent are equally skilled--sooner or later, one of them is going to die. It comes down to the cold, dispassionate unfolding of small determinants of luck--a gust of wind, a jammed cartridge, a speck of dust in the eye.
Bigelow ignores the larger milieu of the war, the context of this daily agony...and it is not missed. Larger purposes fade in the face of the immediate need to stay alive. There is only the wire and the fuse--and when James successfully disarms a bomb, he keeps a memento of it in a box under his bed, a macabre edifice of uncertain intent. His ego? That's probably part of it...an expression of his obsessiveness and reckless pride...but I also saw in it a physical record that he was making actual forward movement, a retrospective paving of the progress he's made--that he had beaten death by this much.
From a critical perspective, there were a few problems--James is reasonably well-developed as a character, but I wanted a little more--wanted to know what at stake for him, what drove him to trade in such deadly skills. Episodic structures only succeed when I'm wholly invested in a character. I never quite got there for James, and as such, the film dragged in the four or five sequences when I wasn't biting my own lip off in tense anticipation. Nonetheless, Bigelow shows remarkable restraint for a movie of this type--it's the self-assured craft of a veteran with nothing to prove. There are none of the easy conclusions that undermine otherwise solid films on the subject, such as Ridley Scott's Body of Lies. Basically, the movie is two hours of driving home the horror of knowing that you could be dead in the space of a second, with no warning whatsoever. It's being lauded as the best film of the year, and certainly the best film on the Iraq war. I'm not willing to underwrite either of these statements quite yet--but at the very least, it is a visceral and unromantic impression of war, and a brutal blow to the gut. It makes Transformers look like a romcom twee-fest.
