The Hurt Locker (2009)
Kathryn Bigelow’s best movies – Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days – have a druggy/sensual pop snap. Bigelow has a gift for plopping you right into her characters’ mindsets – you see even objects as they see them. There’s an alluring, propulsive tactility to the movies of the best action directors, you sense the value of every single part of every single visual beat, and every element locks together with a rhythm that’s exhilarating in its precision and logic – the trick is to have the instinct for allowing the pace to become character. Bigelow’s rhythms could be the narrator of her movies, and probably are, everything is alive, honest, kicky – there’s no self-conscience justification, the purity of Bigelow’s technique is the justification; there’s fetish side-by-side with an empathy of the fetish. The colliding waves of Point Break, always about to swallow the surfers, link logically (or as logically as they can) with the attacks on the banks, because we understand the addictive hold, and beauty, of both – we understand how these psyched-up boneheads are pumping themselves farther and farther from any tangible point of return. Her lauded subjective tracking shots (and there’s an amazing foot-chase in Point Break) is more than just hot-dogging, though that would be enough to put Bigelow at the head of the pack, it’s a straight attempt to become someone else – to use movies as the momentarily cathartic, freeing force that Bigelow’s characters find elsewhere. Like the usual suspects of this sort of picture: Hitchcock or the Powell of Peeping Tom, or De Palma (we keep using the same names because there aren’t many who try or care), Bigelow is working in the cinema of viewer implication, but there’s no righteous hand-slapping; she’s too charged up on her own powers. Strange Days would seem to be the movie that most directly plays to Bigelow’s strengths, but it’s too on the nose literal, and her other pictures are great action movies that need the qualifier “action”, because the scripts are youth-pandering macho claptrap that hold her back… just.this.much.
Bigelow’s new picture, The Hurt Locker, has a mostly lean, muscular script that stays out of her way, and it’s a war picture, which frees both the director and the genre (it’s also an addiction movie). (The script was written by journalist Mark Boal, who traveled with a similar EOD team – a bomb squad.) Bigelow’s staging, almost all physical with soldiers sweating and whispering and shouting over traps that could go off or be remotely detonated any time (anyone can be an insurgent) with any incidental variable a possible death sentence, redeems the war movie. We see a number of war movies, now the current Iraq war, but the specifics are usually a MacGuffin, and we try to rouse ourselves to give a damn, to see the platitudes as anything else in an attempt to be mindful of what real men and women are actually living through. And there were moments in the underrated Stop-Loss, with jittery, loud cuts of men firing guns and getting loud and loaded, that I thought delivered something worth seeing/hearing: the rootless energy of channeling aggression on demand for so long you forget how not to – it brought the waste home more clearly than most of the Coming Home plot could ever hope to (and that movie wasn’t much good to begin with). Bigelow, an action director in her bones, doesn’t need that containment, and she recognizes that she doesn’t want it either. There are images in The Hurt Locker that are among the most vivid of all war movies: a terrifyingly rickety device, that looks and functions as a backyard wagon, wobbling along the rocks; a soldier, clad in a suit that looks ready for space, pacing toward something that could eat him in nearly anything; a cab driver’s face, wrongfully threatened, as the demands become more and more violent – the mirror seemingly contorting his eyes in demonic rage; the rise and slow fall of rocks and debris as the first explosion strikes – briefly frozen in the sort of ironically beautiful monument to destruction that Ridley Scott must have been aiming for in his silly, incoherent Gladiator carnage.
Bigelow makes an anti-war movie by not making an anti-war movie; she indulges the potential narcotic pull of aggression, both real and simulated, to its fullest, and then allows us to see what that unchecked indulgence does. There is an inevitable dark comedy to a picture that’s so intense – we’re watching soldiers turn situations that surpass most men’s nightmares into routine. The Hurt Locker is also unintentionally turning the ridiculous more-more of most action movies on its head; the natural tempo of this picture is enough to power any four desperate, over-cut blockbusters. There’s a potential trapdoor in this type of picture, which is eighty percent climax – that we’re worn down and begin to resent the manipulation of even a gifted director, and that’s, of course, thematically apt for a picture about men as death-defying adrenaline junkies. The Hurt Locker doesn’t go to pains to attribute the soldiers’ hollowed state to war, it allows that these men may have the temperament to be drawn to war, and that the war (may) completes and exasperates their self-destructive tendencies (a regular theme to Bigelow, people are saying that she’s grown here because she’s chosen a somewhat real-life catalyst; she has grown, but not necessarily for that reason).
This picture is very clearly directed; it would be easy to spend everything on Bigelow and overlook the actors, but that would be unfair. The Hurt Locker, again like Stop-Loss, has some unusually vivid performances. We are primarily in three heads: the cowboy/leader James (Jeremy Renner), the voice of reason Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and the nervous, tentative Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), caught between the two stronger personalities, the one who normally dies in these pictures. Yes, everyone is a type; The Hurt Locker is still a genre movie (funny how uncomfortable critics are with that phrase unless it’s derogatory) and everyone here understands that a picture this fevered doesn’t need a lot of playing out – we don’t need the reactions rubbed in our faces. There’s the danger of the familiar white/black thing between James and Sanborn, but that, with the exception of any iffy late scene, never crystallizes. Sanborn, understandably, authentically resents James’ showboating; to degrees that will linger after the picture is over; there’s a moment in the barracks, drunk, late, where we presume its time to kiss and make up, that’s as scary as anything in the desolate village. The twist here, and its greatly needed, is that Sanborn is every bit as sand and danger warped as James, only with a differing sense of self-preservation. James sees the profession as release, as ultimate acknowledgment of the governing uncertainty (and hypocrisy of the illusion of stability) of life – the final knowing that we’re in someone else’s, or nothing’s, hands – and this outlook plays directly into Bigelow’s triggery chaos – this is agonizing, but the boiling down to the existential is also, for James, oddly beautiful. (This is so clear it’s banal, but he’s the Swayze character from Point Break, or the Paxton character from Near Dark, or any one of half-dozen other examples in Bigelow’s work). For Sanborn, James’ outlook is indulgence of a personal whim (this picture is Bigelow’s best because it doesn’t as clearly choose sides – the others always favored the showboats) and to him it, probably, also has something to do with casual white-boy privilege.
There are some shaky, formula scenes that threaten the movie with that too-explicit quality we expect from these pictures. There’s the opening quote, which dulls the surprise of the picture, and a desk doctor with exactly the fate you expect. There’s the last scene between James and Frank, which doesn’t feel right, it softens things. And the brief scenes toward the end on States soil are even worse, particularly some lines between a character and his child – these have a written quality, the character, macho-instinct, wouldn’t say them, and wouldn’t need to, and the wife, all willowy-need, and from a popular TV show, is a soldier-boy fantasy of the little woman back home: we’re too aware of the contrast we’re supposed to register. But The Hurt Locker transcends all of that, and finishes strong, with a pumped-up return to eventual end that’s, eerily, seen as a happy ending – as completion.
I’ve done some reading on the truthiness of the movie’s plotting and so far, but I haven’t found much specifically detailing the plot’s basis in real events. Anyway, I enjoyed the film quite a bit but felt that certain scenes defeated the realism Bigelow was building, specifically James’ cowboy effort to avenge Beckham and his team’s ill-fated hunt into the city to find a bomber. Both felt false and overtly melodramatic, like the sort of silly stuff a Ridley Scott movie engages in to elevate other weak character development.
However, I read a comment at House Next Door that posits the Beckham subplot as a means of proving James’ inability to accomplish anything in the war zone beyond defusing bombs. He’s ill-suited to go off seeking justice. His purpose is simple and singular: make bombs not go off. When he deviates from this, he fails, thus reinforcing his own frustration. He’s not meant to kill bad guys like most combat troops and that lack of bloody validation drives him to take crazy risks.
It’s an interesting take on both scenes and helps prop up what I otherwised considered weak scripting.
Anyway, great review Chuck. Really enjoyed reading your (typically) well-informed analysis.
I meant “to elevate otherwise weak character development.” I won’t bother to correct the other obvious typos though.
Yeah Joel, I took Hurt Locker more as a very good genre movie. In terms of “truthful war movie” I don’t know. I assume that very few are truthful, if any. Or literally truthful that is.
“she indulges the potential narcotic pull of aggression, both real and simulated, to its fullest, and then allows us to see what that unchecked indulgence does.” Exactly and that’s what sets this apart from what most people mean when they talk about genre pictures. There’s a THERE there, and the brilliant thing is she makes her point within the confines of the action genre, using its tools without ever denigrating them or unnecessarily elevating them.
I should probably make an effort to see this one again to refresh my memory of it. I had a few issues with it…the kid subplot seemed a little on the nose, but I’ve read some excellent justifications for it.
Charlie, A very good review of a total fiction. I realize that it is a MOVIE. However, it is so far from reality that it is beyond legitimate description. I’m sure the Holloywood elite will give it numerous Awards. It is about as relevant as Apoc
alypse Now. Your reviews are really a good read.
Thanks Gary,
I tend to be iffy, particularly with war pictures, in drawing generalizations about their “reality”. Experienced folks would certianly have more of value to offer on that subject than me. That said, I think HL is a terrific thriller made by a director at the top of her game.