Cast: This is basically Jessica Chastain's movie even though there are some good chunks of time where she is largely forgotten. I can see why people are calling the Oscars a two-horse race between her and Jennifer Lawrence, although Lawrence has the much flashier performance. Almost everything Chastain does in this movie is very subtle which make her few outbursts very rewarding. I think I'm finally on her bandwagon. As for the rest of the cast, it's another one of those ensembles that I've been seeing a lot of and am glad to. Jason Clarke is the sort of mentor to Chastain and plays the world-weary analyst well. Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini, and some other guys play upper-management in the CIA which they do convincingly. Mark Duplass is in yet another movie in 2012. Where does he find the time? Joel Edgerton and Chriss Pratt are the main two special forces guys we meet who take down Osama bin Laden (oops, Spoiler Alert). There's a ton of other people, but I'd have to look up their names, so I'll stop here.
Plot: So, on September 11, 2001, there was this terrorist attack orchestrated by a radical fundamentalist named Osama bin Laden (sound familiar?). The story of the movie is the considerably reduced story of catching and killing bin Laden. It hits the expected beats of Chastain joins the CIA, experiences some set backs, goes with her gut, then kills the bad guy (in short, it's not much different from a Bond movie in that way). The pacing though, is very deliberate and it never feels like they are adding plot simply to spice things up. The sequence at the end, when they kill Osama is wonderfully tense and starkly honest (which made the lady sitting next to me very uncomfortable). The one thing I didn't fully get was the disparity between Chastain's certainty that Osama was where she thought and the lack of certainty from everyone else. In two hours, I was pretty convinced. They had years to be convinced. I know that there had to have been thousands of false leads on Osama, but the movie really only follows the one. Without an assumed level of historical context going in, everyone else's doubt comes off as servicing the plot more than anything.
Elephant in the Room: Isn't actual CIA stuff pretty boring? Ten year manhunt for bin Laden. The movie has several time jumps. The big clues are getting a phone number and satellite surveillance. The Osama compound isn't a fortress. It's just a couple families. None of this is very sexy by itself, which makes the direction all the more impressive (how Bigelow didn't get nominated even has me questioning if the Academy is sexist, plain stupid, or both). Because the manhunt was so big and took so long, the movie is asked to compress a lot of information. For the movie to work, there is a lot of assuming you already know the story, which I think will make it hard to hold up ten or twenty years from now. Or, maybe I'm wrong. Only time will tell.
To Sum Things Up:
I certainly found this film to be better than The Hurt Locker (a movie that I never understood the adoration for) in almost every way. I honestly don't think that the true story was interesting enough for a movie, but given that, Kathryn Bigelow did one hell of a job. Jessica Chastain is as good as advertised and the supporting cast isn't far behind. I recommend this to anyone, with the caveat that anyone squeamish about a little torture or unglamorous shootings might want to sit this one out.
Random Thought: I really do feel bad for actors of Middle-Eastern descent. They still do only get to play terrorists in movies. It's unfortunate.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment