THE HURT LOCKER
Three Cinescene writers on Kathryn Bigelow's stunning Iraq film.

Chris Knipp

Already celebrated for its breathtaking realism in depicting soldiers and explosions, The Hurt Locker is being called "the best Iraq war movie," with the qualification that the genre has been weak and the public response weaker. This is Kathryn Bigelow all right: macho men in dazzling exploits, exhilarating and always a little terrifying to watch, with adrenalin and testosterone spurting off the screen. If war is a drug, this movie could give you a contact high. Bigelow was obviously born to make a war movie. The only question is why she took this long to do so. Writer Mark Boal led her into it. He embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq, and came back with remarkable stories and a character to hold them together. He's Staff Sergeant William James, who's what in the genteel days of The English Patient was more commonly called a "sapper," a combat engineer who specializes in demolitions, minefields, and the like. Bigelow wisely chose Jeremy Renner, an unknown and unglamorous actor, for this pleasingly enigmatic role of a man who may be closer to bombs and timers than to his own comrades.

The Hurt Locker (soldier slang for a real bad place) gives you immediacy and verité soldier life, with the shaky digital camera and in-and-out zooms of the genre (the action is so good, we soon forget them, while in Brian De Palms's crude 2007 Redacted, they grate all through). Such authenticity is achieved in Brit documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield's more political, excellent, little seen, low-budget 2005 drama Battle for Haditha. It may not make his film unbiased, but Broomfield most notably gives more detail of the Iraqi P.O.V., using using real Iraqis, while Bigelow sticks to showing Iraqis as the American soldiers experience them, an experience that turns out to be insane, paranoia-inducing, and scary. (In both movies one of the few friendly forms of contact is buying and selling pirated DVDs, the US soldiers buying, the Iraqis selling, and in both this contact becomes a key plot element.)

Obviously Bigelow also had a much bigger budget, the better to provide a wealth of spectacular explosions, essential (or justified anyway) since this is about a small team of three men whose main (but by no means only) job is to find and defuse improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the DIY but sometimes highly ingenious signature weapons of the Iraqi insurgency. There is also a horrifying body bomb; a complicated and lethal car bomb in front of a UN building; a suicide bomber who has a change of heart (as in Hany Abu-Assad's 2005 Paradise Now); and a hairy firefight with snipers (with a somewhat obtrusive cameo by Ralph Fiennes) out in the desert. Besides which the adrenalin-numbed Sergeant James independently gets himself and his two squad members, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), into various private and probably unnecessary severe crap storms. All of this is staged with stunning accomplishment and a strong focus on character and the interactions, intense even when alienated, of these three men.

The movie takes no political stand, other than the opening quote from Chris Hedges: "War is a drug." This is like the point of view Andrew Swoford used for Sam Mendes' 2005 Jarhead, which, however unsuccessful in some aspects and poorly received, conveys that soldiers don't question war because they're too busy doing dangerous jobs, or waiting and hoping to do them, and trying to stay alive until, God willing, their tour ends.

The Hurt Locker is episodic and cyclical. Thanks to Boal's writing, Bigelow's fine directing, and an excellent cast, the episodes never seem routine or repetitive. But if you emerge with a sense of numbing danger and pointlessness that may not be inappropriate. The only structure is the routine one of datelines saying how many days are left in Bravo company's tour. But this is a figure that, as Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss depicts, can be set back to start again.

The opening sequence is excruciatingly tense, a textbook street IED diffusion job that conveys how terrified the two backup guys are and sets up what's to come. This is a team, with all three in radio contact and each with his function, Sanborn the lookout in charge of Eldridge, who's the guard. The street is surrounded with buildings and people and deep in unknowns. When James arrives shortly after, we don't feel the danger except by remembering the first sequence, because James is so immune to it. Sanborn and Eldridge are freaking out because James doesn't stay in touch with him when he's suited up dealing with the device. They feel lost. There's immediate intense conflict between Sanborn, an elegant, chiseled black man with extensive intelligence experience, and the puffy-cheeked James whom Sanborn calls "redneck trailer trash" straight off to his face. These telegraphed macho conflicts, essential Bigelow, work because the jobs being done are all so convincingly and intensely depicted.

We also realize that though James may leave his men to fend for themselves and not follow the textbook, he's so brilliant at what he does it doesn't seem to matter. Maybe detonating improvised bombs in a war zone is so risky only an insane daredevil can excel at it. Every time James goes out he knows his life is on the line, but he is not out to get killed. He knows, as he tells an officer congratulating him on an exploit, that the best way to defuse a bomb is "whatever way doesn't get you killed."

This movie is about the adrenalin rush of war but also about loving your work and doing it exceedingly well, and how that may hurt those around you but become your sole raison d'etre. In one of the film's too few pauses for breath, James and his team relax by listening to earsplitting music, getting blasted on whiskey, and beating up on each other. Thus they come to a kind of mute understanding. Eldridge is the bull-necked baby, whose sweetness allows him to voice the bitter message that this is meaningless and that he is going to die. Eldridge also declares that he will disappear and no one will care. Sanborn comes to admire him and wish he could do what James does. But nobody can do what James does. He's a "wild man," a trapeze artist flying without a net, a matador walking in for the kill of a nasty bull 365 days a year.

You'll have to see if the way we're left hanging becomes thought-provoking in a Brechtian way, or if you're just left limp and numb. Brilliant and intense as Kathryn Bigelow's film is, like a distillation of the most intense moments of her best earlier films (like Near Dark and Point Break fused), it lacks emotional depths, chiefly because the characters can't linger over any emotions and we don't get time to resonate with them.

James is a lovely creation, believable and intriguing in his opacity. The movie gets the American Iraq war soldier's sense of danger, of the routine hostility of the locals. A gang of little boys throw rocks at the crew's Humvee as if just playing. A man standing in a shop with a cell phone is an imminent danger. A housewife in a burqa attacks the invincible James in her house and he seems overwhelmed. Iraqis who're friendly are terrifying, and may be unhinged (and still dangerous) -- or daredevils, like James himself.

This is a great movie, and meaty stuff, but it still somehow leaves you empty. The other Iraq movies were cloying and had too much to say, but though a lack of preaching is one of The Hurt Locker's strengths, its focus on one man somehow doing a job isolated even from his own team fails to provide any larger context of the war or of the country. The director is so caught up in what she's doing that it's infectious, but the compelling intensity also represents a loss of perspective. Still, if there is any non-documentary Iraq war movie that's a must-see, this has got to be it, and it's by far the best thing the uneven but gifted Kathryn Bigelow has ever done. It's a game-changer, the new American war movie to beat.

©2009 Chris Knipp

*

Howard Schumann

Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America, said that “Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but…nobody comes home unchanged.” Indeed, the Army’s first study of the mental health of troops who fought in Iraq found that about one in eight reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks, nightmares, feelings of detachment, irritability, trouble concentrating and sleeplessness. Even more distressing is the fact that the suicide rate among veterans is almost four times the average for non-veterans of the same age.

Some possible reasons behind these statistics are spelled out in Kathryn Bigelow’s magnificent The Hurt Locker, a heart-wrenching film that explores the world of Explosive Ordinance Disposal technicians in Iraq whose job is to locate and disarm IEDs. Structured around the 38 days three men in the EOD squad have left in their rotation, the film is set in Baghdad in 2004 and shot with a hand held camera that underscores the sudden movements and constant tension of the unit which must constantly scan rooftops and hiding places for possible snipers.

Mirroring the opening quote from American author and journalist Chris Hedges, “The rush of battle is a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug,” Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), thrives on the adrenaline rush his job entails, seemingly oblivious to the dangers he faces or even the reality of the world around him. Unsurprisingly, problems with the other two officers on the squad soon manifest. Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a by-the-book soldier finds James a bit too willing to disobey protocol and take unnecessary risks.

Called “a wild man” by a visiting colonel, Sgt. James claims to have dismantled close 900 IEDs. At one point, James takes off his protective helmet and disconnects his communications gear so that a disbelieving Sanborn is unable to communicate with him. In addition, his reckless actions seems to enhance the fears of Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who is seeking private counseling for his obsession with death. Though James is a hot dog, he is a complex character as portrayed by Jeremy Renner in an Oscar-caliber performance. He befriends an Iraqi boy who sells DVDs, gives his support to the troubled Eldridge, calls his wife and young son frequently, and reaches out to Sanborn though their perspective on life is vastly divergent.

Written by journalist Mark Boal, who had spent time with a bomb disposal unit, The Hurt Locker lacks a coherent narrative, but its strength lies in the experience, not in the story. While the film doesn't offer a political commentary on the War in Iraq, it more than brings home the insanity of all wars. No sequence in any recent war film is more horrifying than the scene in which James has two minutes to dismantle a time bomb strapped to an Iraqi suicide bomber. While the would-be bomber pleads that he is a family man, James races against the clock but even his normally cool demeanor gives way to a chilling desperation, an experience increasingly felt by everyone in the theater.

©2009 Howard Schumann

*

Chris Dashiell

Jeremy Renner has barely appeared on the radar as a character actor up until now. I remember him as a member of the rogue’s band in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His previous leading role was as Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer, which I haven’t seen, but Kathryn Bigelow did, and remembered. In The Hurt Locker, he plays Sergeant Will James as a tight bundle of energy, an explosives expert with a swagger that comes from knowing he’s the best at what he does. One of the film’s finest sequences shows him trying to figure out how to defuse a car bomb—he keeps going past the point where it’s even necessary to keep trying, only because he’s genuinely curious about how the damn thing is rigged, and you can see the professional fascination in his eyes as he keeps digging around in the seats, the dashboard, the engine. That obsessive quality makes him a danger to himself and his men, because the rush he gets from what he does overrides his sense of duty.

It was a shrewd move by Bigelow to cast this offbeat, snub-nosed actor in the leading role instead of the usual big name star with conventional good looks. We’re meant to distrust and be exasperated with James, just like the men under his command, even while we can’t help but admire the man’s fearlessness. In one scene, the two soldiers on his team (the excellent Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) half-jokingly debate the idea of blowing James up when he nonchalantly wanders into a detonating field to retrieve his gloves, and we understand why they would do this—there’s nothing you want less in a combat zone than a reckless cowboy. The audience finds itself ironically identifying with Sanborn (Mackie) who represents the entirely sane and professional desire to stay alive, and at the screening I attended, a few clapped when he punched James in the face after the episode with the car bomb.

Bigelow immerses us in the experience of American soldiers in 2004 Iraq, where the sense of threat is constantly heightened, and the carnage from suicide bombings overwhelms their ability to feel empathy. The film also focuses on the furious tension of combat—a terrific sequence in which the unit gets pinned down with a group of Brits in the middle of the desert takes all the time it needs to portray what it takes to carefully pick off enemy snipers one by one. Critics have called the movie apolitical because it has nothing to say about the politics of the war, but this is really one of its biggest strengths. Bigelow is totally committed to recreating the experience of war as far as possible on film, and that commitment makes any abstract arguments unnecessary.

The picture goes slightly astray whenever the screenplay tries to shape the more familiar contours of a plot. James’ zealous pursuit of revenge for an Iraqi kid that he thinks was murdered is hard to swallow when it takes him out of the Green Zone. The troubled vulnerability of Specialist Eldridge (Geraghty) is also difficult to credit—those who’ve signed up for this sort of duty would be past such qualms, or be transferred by now rather than simply seeing the company shrink. These are, however, minor quibbles when one considers the film’s propulsive movement, vivid sense of mortality, and serious editing craft. In the end, Bigelow makes us feel viscerally how a man could become hooked on the peak experience of combat, and how all the ordinary joys and sorrows of life can become diminished until there is nothing left of a man but a half-mad warrior.

©2009 Chris Dashiell
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