It’s a tad lazy and thoughtless when people praise a film for being “apolitical.” This has been popping up in regards to “The Hurt Locker,” a film that should be seen and praised from people on both sides of the aisle, regardless of denomination or even IQ. The fact of the matter is, however, that all great art has strong political undertones. You can peruse the spiderweb of creative and thematic intentions of director Kathryn Bigelow, who has never worked with stronger material, but notice the style, the tension, the patterns of elevating and falling action.
“The Hurt Locker” is, ostensibly, an action film, a rip-roaring, tense, unsettling experience destined to provide a charge in the seats of thrill junkies and arthouse audiences alike because of how the camera, editing and sparse music engage the audience. It’s politics lie in how it defiantly reestablishes the primary genre of all movies to be action films- how they move, jolt and jump from scene to scene connected by narrative cohesion and thematic weight. Simply put, “The Hurt Locker” is like someone time traveling from before the era of Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers and the like and firmly establishing, THIS is how you thrill an audience.
Baghdad provides the setting for the film, curiously staged in mid-Bush 2004, where we meet a group of bomb-defusing troops stationed in the heart of warfare, busy city streets and empty desert areas where terrorists have set up shop, leaving behind IED’s to collect corpses. This grim, seemingly mundane activity is livened up early on as we meet the crew who, after a jolting opening sequence, find themselves without a Staff Sergeant. Cautious, measured Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and uneasy, conflicted Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) soon have to get adjusted to replacement defuser James (Jeremy Renner), a reckless thrill junkie who’s got a boatload of experience and a similar backlog of psychological issues.
There’s not a whole lot of plot, not an extremely complex story structure in place, which allows the world of the film to breathe. Each moment with a bomb present catches the air in your throat. One wrong move, and we’re at the end of the movie. Bigelow’s decision to employ big stars in small roles (Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes pop up) seems to be a cheap tactic at first at distracting audience’s attention, but its actually a way to illustrate an endless conflict. The story we watch exists in a bubble- are we getting the beginning or the end of this conflict? Like the thorny situation American troops find themselves in overseas, there seems to be no exit plan for the narrative, and as such events occur in a loop. Survive, lose a member, downtime, run- it’s how many unpredictable variations of this that have forced our occupation to continue, and, somewhat sadly, keep the movie fresh. It’s the unfortunate trade off — conflict and bloodshed leads to movies about conflict and bloodshed. The irony is that, regarding the Middle East, none of the recent ones have been any good, save for “Hurt Locker.”
When Staff Sgt. James settles in to take down a bomb, often in a busy section of the street, Bigelow is illustrating a keen understanding of the dog-and-pony show this war has become for both sides. Several residents in the area stop and watch, and the characters have no idea if these bystanders are innocent, or if they’re responsible for the bomb going off. In this atmosphere, you realize everyone can be a threat- even if they aren’t responsible for the weapon sitting in the middle of the town, they may not have the best intentions. Once a seemingly innocent bystander picks up a phone or, in one tense moment, films an operation with a video camera, the soldiers react like ants under a magnifying glass.
Renner’s thrill seeking soldier is a cigarette-sucking rebel, and his acting choices create a characterization that is both alien and recognizable. He’s not a Riggs-ian madman, but rather someone who’s learned to reinterpret life on his own terms, his brushes with death creating a recontextualization of where the future might take him. Brian Geraghty’s Eldridge brings to life the young, gun shy recruit role, bringing out the humanity in what seems like a simpleton on the page, his clipped mouth and skinny eyes ideal for a character with much more on his mind than he lets on. When he asks why he’s been deployed here, he could be talking about Baghdad or Planet Earth. The standout has to be Anthony Mackie’s Sanborn. Sanborn responds poorly to James’ recklessness, but for bureaucratic reasons he’s taken to heart- James’ might jump in headfirst, but he does want to save as many people as he can, and shows himself to Sanborn as a bleeding heart. Sanborn responds to this, but is cagey about staying on message and following protocol, knowing that they lie in a gray area where a single misstep can cost you the lives of the men around you.
Long pigeonholed as “that action chick,” hopefully this is the film to bring Kathryn Bigelow the credit she deserves. Sure, “The Hurt Locker” is her best film, but its not at all unlike the romantic tension established in “Near Dark” or the kinetic excitement produced by “Point Break,” an entertaining action film that would be hailed as a classic had it come out in today’s marketplace. She shoots action quickly and with maximum tension, but she’s smart enough to gather tension by letting action unfold, letting actors explore the frame with their physicality. Like “Point Break”‘s memorable foot chase, Bigelow is intrigued by the arms and legs of action film characters, and in this film she often lets the soldiers (nonsexually) strip down to tee-shirts and tight pants to illustrate their humanity and vulnerability, ratcheting up tension with such proximity to terrifying violence. It shows a concern for spatial discrepancies, between characters, between action and intention, between life and death. It’s one of many reasons why “The Hurt Locker” is one of the most exciting movies you’ll see this year. [A]