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Review
The Iraq war has been dramatized on film many times, and those films have been ignored just as many times by theatre audiences. But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is the most skillful and emotionally involving picture yet made about the conflict. The film, from a script by Mark Boal, has a new subject: the heroism of the men who defuse improvised explosive devices, sloppily made but lethal bombs planted under a bag or a pile of garbage or just beneath the dirt of a Baghdad street. Bigelow stages one prolonged and sinister shoot-out in the desert, but the movie couldn’t be called a combat film, nor is it political, except by implication—a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene. The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt. “The Hurt Locker” narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat.
Over and over, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), following a tip-off, walks to a bomb site in a heavy protective suit and tries to figure out how to pull apart clumsily tangled wires and flimsy triggering devices. We’ve seen James’s predecessor die on the job: a man watching him from a nearby store detonated a bomb with a cell phone. As James goes in, slowly, under a hot sun, treading like a spaceman through trash-filled streets, people gather in doorways or look out windows. Which of them is hostile, which friendly, which merely curious? The two other members of James’s team, the frightened young Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and the wary, experienced Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), cover James, screaming at anyone who moves. The two men feel entirely vulnerable; they both admire and detest James, who pulls them into situations they would rather leave to someone else.
In the past, Kathryn Bigelow, now fifty-seven, has outdone the macho movie boys at their own game. In her “Blue Steel” (1989), as Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a cop, geared up for a day’s work, Bigelow focussed on her revolver, her leather holster, and her shoes, in gleaming closeup. The sequence hovered somewhere between fetish and parody. Bigelow went into the ocean with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfer-crime movie “Point Break” (1991), and brought off scenes of languorously slo-mo destruction in the cultish sci-fi crime movie “Strange Days” (1995). By the mid-nineties, I had her figured as a violence junkie with a strong tendency to stylize everything into stunning images that didn’t always mean much. As a filmmaker, Bigelow is still obsessed with violence, but she’s become a master at staging it. In “The Hurt Locker,” there are no wasted shots or merely beautiful images. As Eldridge and Sanborn jerk their guns this way and that at a bomb scene, Bigelow, working with the great cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, jerks the camera around, too. She wants us to be there, to feel the danger, the mystery.
This kind of immediacy is commonplace in action filmmaking, but, unlike so many directors today, who jam together crashes, explosions, and people sailing through the air in nonsensical montages of fantasy movement, Bigelow keeps the space tight and coherent. No matter how many times she cuts away, you know exactly where James is in relation to a bomb—whether he’s in the kill zone or far enough away to be safe. (You can’t break up the integrity of space when space is the subject of your movie.) And Bigelow prolongs the moment, stretching out our anxiety almost to the point at which it becomes pain. “The Hurt Locker” is quite a feat: in this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like “Some of us like explosions. Ease up.” Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.
The insistence on plainness, the absence of stylization, carries over to the performances as well. Jeremy Renner has played the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and many minor roles in action movies. He has a round face, with a beautiful smile that he mostly keeps hidden, and a strong but unglamorous body. Bigelow’s idea in casting him, I think, was to make her star a competent but physically ordinary American serviceman whose greatest gifts are within. William James, it turns out, is implacably heroic. He never steps away from danger. You might say that he’s drawn to it and needs it, but he never makes a fuss about what he’s doing. His charisma consists of having no obvious charisma except phenomenal concentration and guts. And since he knows, handling bombs, when to be cautious and when not to be, he can be hair-raisingly casual, tossing aside a disabled device as if it were an empty juice carton. At one point, he shucks his headset, too, and Sanborn, who needs to stay in touch with what James is doing, is so enraged that he slugs him. In the nineteen-fifties, Aldo Ray played men like William James—war lovers, completely at home on the battlefield but hapless in the normal relations of life. (When James and his partners relax and get drunk, the only way they can show their affection is to punch one another in the stomach.) But Ray’s military men were unreachable, stone-cold killers, while James has strong emotions, which he keeps pent up.
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