Cloak zero

Imagine being the guy who personally took out Osama bin Laden. Now imagine you were the woman who tracked him down. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty posits both post-9/11 fantasies in one — something for the testosterone crowd, and something for the estrogen crowd.

Okay, more like everything for the testosterone crowd. Jessica Chastain (last seen in Tree of Life) plays Maya, a redheaded CIA operative determined to follow a slim lead for years until it brings her to Osama bin Laden’s secret message courier.

We know that this courier, alias Abu Ahmed, eventually led CIA intelligence to a concrete fortress compound 40 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan, yet no visual proof of bin Laden was available to call in a kill mission.

But Maya is not like a lot of the CIA careerists in Bigelow’s chick flick with balls: she’s convinced that her hunch on Ahmed is a direct link to the 9/11 mastermind. She becomes a zealot for her cause, not only because the closest thing she had to a friend in the agency, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), gets blown to bits by a bin Laden “source” wearing a bomb vest. (The scenes between Chastain and Ehle are like a mirror version of all those cop/soldier buddy movies from the Simpson/Bruckheimer era, except instead of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover trading wisecracks, these two women just establish good, solid rapport onscreen.)

Zero Dark Thirty is about a real mission — a Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden’s compound — but it depicts a lot of things the CIA would like to deny ever took place. Such as waterboarding prisoners. Naturally, this is something the US government and CIA would prefer not to admit to; but the subject of waterboarding was actually taken up by the US Congress as early as 2008, when George W. Bush nominee for Attorney General Micheal Mukasey claimed it did not amount to torture. “Repugnant,” Mukasey told Congress, but to call it torture would “open up a Pandora’s Box.” (This was a view on torture parroted by Bush’s two previous Attorneys General, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, by the way.)

Waterboarding is only the tip of the iceberg in Zero Dark Thirty. Maya watches as her mentor Dan (Jason Clarke) strips a prisoner down, slips a dog collar around his neck before leading him around on all fours, and eventually places him inside a sensory deprivation box as big as a microwave oven.

These tactics, the movie seems to say, while repugnant, did actually lead to concrete information.

…While guys are agreeable tools of destruction.

Critics of Zero Dark Thirty have a different beef: not that such torture never took place, but that the movie depicts it as an effective method to gather information. Yet Bigelow’s movie, while graphic, focuses on the very limitations of such practices, and how important every other strand or lead can be. 

The change from the Bush years to the Obama years brings a shift in political winds. The terms “Gitmo” and “Abu Ghraib” become media poison. “Politics are changing,” Dan warns Maya before heading home to a “normal existence” Stateside. “You don’t want to be the one left holding the dog collar.”

Nevertheless, Maya sticks around, tracks her lead and tries for years to convince the boys at Langley that she’s right. Sitting at a table with CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini) and a bunch of hedging males who don’t want to commit to a raid on the compound without visual confirmation, she lays her cards on the table. “I’m 100 percent certain it’s him. Okay, I’ll say 95 percent, ‘cause I know how much certainty freaks you guys out. But it’s 100 percent.”

In this, Maya reminds us of another unwavering CIA analyst from popular culture — Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes in the hit TV show Homeland. But Maya makes Carrie Mathison look like Little Bo Peep. Plus she’s based on a real person.

For Bigelow, the first woman to win a directing Oscar (for The Hurt Locker), this based-on-true-life story must have seemed like the jackpot: almost all the strong characters are females, at least until the gripping raid on bin Laden’s compound that takes up the last 45 minutes of the movie. Then, what was already a taut cat-and-mouse thriller becomes a thrilling action movie.

The scenes depicting Red Squadron’s post-midnight assault in Stealth choppers (hence the title “Zero Dark Thirty,” for 12:30 a.m.) are reminiscent of the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now. The room-by-room search is heart stopping. Did it really go down like this? Bigelow reportedly spent years talking with intelligence and military operators for the film.

Bigelow had been working on an earlier script about the failed search for bin Laden when real life overtook Hollywood: the mastermind of 9/11 was reported dead and she had to start from scratch. But her research paid off; the script by Mark Boal is loaded with inside dope. Terms like “tradecraft” begin to let us in on the secret patterns of terrorists: they work under the cloak of darkness, in silence; their presence is detected by the very absence of intercepted “chatter.”

We begin to understand how nearly impossible it was to get a fix on bin Laden after 9/11 because of the high level of “white noise” chatter. For every 10,000 leads on his whereabouts, 9,999 would prove to be wrong, or misleading. Maya stumbled on that elusive one thread leading to his Pakistan compound. True, the CIA also funneled untold millions into buying information (in one scene, a Kuwaiti source is paid off for a suspect’s phone number — with a brand new Lamborghini).

Though Zero Dark Thirty has a documentary feel, Bigelow allows herself a wide berth for creative storytelling: this is dramatic narrative, not the 100-percent according-to-Hoyle truth. But then again, one could say the same thing about Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Maya stays focused on her target like a laser. Her impatience is palpable — at one point, she writes a number on her CIA chief’s window with an erasable Sharpie, counting off every day they know the whereabouts of bin Laden’s compound yet fail to pounce. What Zero Dark Thirty posits is an answer to the vexing question many felt in the immediate wake of 9/11: Why aren’t they finding Osama bin Laden? If the film is accurate, it turns out they were looking all along.