The Hurt Locker
A very good movie with very good acting, weakened a bit by the two sequences at the end — but only a bit, which is a testament to how well built the rest of the movie is. It put me in mind of Michael Clayton, another perfectly paced film whose solid crafting didn’t divert your attention from the work at hand.
Spoil-cifics after the jump.
It’s also a testament, in the case of that final Humvee scene between James and Sanborn, to Anthony Mackie. I’ve liked Mackie in the past, but something about it him always distracted me and I couldn’t figure out what.About ten minutes into The Hurt Locker, I finally nailed it — he looks like the African-American version of an ex of mine. With that tiny pea ejected from my mental mattress, I could just watch the guy, and he almost puts that exchange over. Having not gone to war, I can’t say how soldiers and vets speak about it (in my family, it was The Subject We Don’t Bring Up, Ever, Is That Clear), and the two actors get it nearly there in terms of it feeling like the way men talk. It just needed a line or two shaved off, or to end on “I want a son” — something to pull it back just a bit.
Ditto the “James talking to his infant son” bit. It’s actually a well-written sequence of lines, for a novel; I understand why they were left in, and the “one thing” is pivotal to finishing the film. (And to discussions of it afterwards; Mr. S and I disagree on what the one thing is for James.) But this isn’t a novel, and in contrast to the very quick, very tight part where he’s de-leafing the gutters, the claustrophobic shot set-ups, the lush sound design of the rain…the explainy bit felt stagey. (It’s also time to force that Bounty Of America grocery-aisle shot into retirement for at least ten years. Yea, how the many varieties of Cheerios miss the heart of happiness! …Been done.)
I quibble on these points because the rest of it is so thoughtfully, confidently done. It’s gripping, it earns its emotional choices, and some of the praise might seem too sweaty — I didn’t find it unbearably tense, but I watched Generation Kill and may have developed a callus with this particular topic — but it does what it sets out to do.
Based on the contenders I’ve seen in the category, Bigelow should take Best Director. Probably won’t, but should.
Death Race 51, Sarah 7
Tags: Anthony Mackie Jeremy Renner Kathryn Bigelow movies Oscars 2010 Death Race patriotic cliches
No, I actually would call Bigelow the favorite right now for the win, although I think they’ll do the split and give Avatar Best Picture. People (including those who vote) are excited about a woman having a chance to break that barrier, and this one is deserving, and her ex already has one of these things. (As even he pointed out the other day.)
I’ve been a fan of KB’s since Near Dark, so I love that she’s getting all this love for the best thing she’s done. I worried that she would stop getting chances after Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker were such costly bombs. Even when a script has major problems (Blue Steel) or has a silly premise and overripe acting to the point of camp (Point Break) her movies are so viscerally, breathtakingly exciting.
I took the “one thing” to be danger/risk, and the commentary track on the DVD seems to support that, if memory serves.
I thought the grocery-store aisle shot was justified. Here it was more about the aimless fog this character was in in Cozy Domestic Land — not so much about endless bounty as his paralysis in the face of it. Even though he had a cute kid and a wife who looked like Evangeline Lilly, he was just moving around anesthetized. It wasn’t his world anymore.
The one thing *I* didn’t like was the reprise of the rock music for the final shots. Yeah, it bracketed James’s first appearance, when he was listening to the same stuff on headphones, but I thought it muddied the film’s message when we heard it as he walked into the distance (and, surely, his eventual demise) at the end. A more sober underscore would have been better.
Good work from the big stars in the small parts here (Pearce, Fiennes).
Here it was more about the aimless fog this character was in in Cozy Domestic Land — not so much about endless bounty as his paralysis in the face of it.
To my mind, that’s a distinction without a difference. I’m fine with presenting the aimless fog, but doing it in the grocery aisle is tired, and the script could have found another way (did, in fact, with the gutters, which was an on-the-nose image but matched up well enough with his work in the service that it didn’t bother me).
With you on the one thing. Mr. S thinks he meant his son — not sure where that impression came from.
Roger Ebert so praised this film on his website that I took to muttering “Why doncha just MARRY it if you love it so much” every time I went there (and I love Roger Ebert.)
Frankly, I heard so much about it’s viceralness and immediacy I was terrified to see it alone, and finally dragged my husband out to see it with me. I really loved it when I wasn’t choking on the tension.
I agree that I didn’t need to feel implicated in the cereal aisle (I only buy granola! I’m sorry I’m a consumer!) But did like the whole at home sequence, the way he realizes that this woman and child should mean something to him, but don’t. The drug of war has transformed him cell by cell into a creature that can only find its niche in one environment.
I have put off seeing this movie, in part at least because my husband is a Marine veteran of Desert Storm and Somalian relief efforts, and watching Black Hawk Down put me off anything of the kind. I just get too involved and end up nearly hyperventilating. I can’t analyze any of it intellectually, despite having taken my share of semiotics and media-criticism classes; the viewing experience bypasses the conscious mind and goes straight to the reflexes.
It’s gratifying to pick up the implication here that while The Hurt Locker isn’t exactly pro-war, it isn’t anti-military. I come from a military family, and it just seems that there have been entirely too many Marines-are-all-brain-dead-savages movies. I might give this a go after all.
On the whole, it’s very good, albeit a little uneven. The movie works best when it hinges on the battlefield set pieces, most notably the sniper sequence in the desert. Bigelow develops an incredibly tense and watchable vibe on those occasions. The movie starts to lose its focus, although not for very long, when it attempts to interject an overriding plot surrounding Jeremy Renner’s character, at which point, it drags a bit, particularly the whole thing with the little Iraqi kid selling the bootleg DVDs, to say nothing of the whole “Let’s Sharpie targets on our guts and kick the living crap out of each other” thing.
However, I think it does an excellent job at making its points without shoving them down people’s throats. If you were opposed to the war, the movie demonstrates the chaos, uncertainty, and even pointlessness of fighting a war where friend and foe are indistinguishable, right up until the bomb goes off. If you were in favor of the war (and even if you weren’t, really), it will certainly leave you with a renewed respect for the people who volunteered for this conflict.
One other observation I felt like making was the motivation for Renner’s character, which is to point out that the tagline in the movie’s poster was “War is a drug,” which I think sort of dilutes the film’s power a bit, along the same lines as the overall plotline. In talking with my friends who served in the war, I’m given to understand that the film got most of the details pretty well right. However, the motivation for [SPOILER ALERT!] most people who go back is not so much a desire for the familiar or a continued adrenaline rush from their work (although such people are there), but is, rather, to finish the job they started and/or to get back with the people they’ve served alongside and did not want to leave behind. Renner’s character giving that as a motivation for they way he acts in the field would have been far more powerful than the rush his work gives him.
I just saw this last night (it’s been at the top of my queue since before it came out thank you Netflix) but wow am I with Jaybird here – same thing going on here with the military family, brother just got out of the Army, so I wasn’t sure if I could handle it (though weirdly enough, I loved Generation Kill). I agree with Sars’ cereal aisle complaint: I was just like, really? We’re going here after everything in Iraq was so interesting? It was like Bigelow’s choice to even put that scene in the movie, knowing how played out it is, was a nod to the consumerist drudgery that is civilian life back in the states? I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt there. Especially since that long-ass aisle was seriously half full of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I checked.
But I love Anthony Mackie, and I loved him in this. And I agree with Drew that the whole “war is a drug” thing at the beginning kind of cheated the movie’s impact. And also that it just felt a little…something. I can’t think of the word – to have James go back simply because he’s addicted to the rush – my brother, who hates Iraq, hates the Army, and hates what we’re doing over there, might have gone back if he had anyone left in his troop to fight for. Though in the context of the movie, and his character, it made sense.
Either way, I liked it, but I still want Up to win for best picture.
I’m not sure he went back because he needed the rush. I think he went back because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. He only knows who he is when he’s in the extreme conditions of combat.
[It was like Bigelow’s choice to even put that scene in the movie, knowing how played out it is, was a nod to the consumerist drudgery that is civilian life back in the states? I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt there.]
I didn’t have an issue with the scene, but it’s possible Bigelow was being faithful to the letter of Mark Boal’s screenplay there. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know, but I *have* read the screenplay for another of this year’s nominees, and I was surprised by how tightly the director adhered to it in the end product. Things I might have credited (or blamed) him for were there in detail on the page.
One thing Bigelow and James Cameron have in common: they’re better directors than writers. Blue Steel, the last film Bigelow co-wrote, makes a good exhibit here. It’s suspenseful; it’s atmospheric; it has a distinctive and arresting visual style; some of the actors do excellent work (it has one of Jamie Lee Curtis’s best performances) — all that keeps it from being a great thriller is a screenplay that doesn’t make a lick of sense. For example, the whole movie hinges on an early scene in which multiple witnesses to an attempted robbery are unable to say for sure afterward that they saw a gun in the robber’s hand. Even the checker at whom the gun was pointed can’t swear that it wasn’t a knife (!). Nearer the end, Curtis knocks out a burly male officer and steals his uniform, which fits her very well…bust darts and all. There are half-realized subplots, weird motivations of the “just to enable the next scene” variety, and so on.
*Un*like Cameron, Bigelow is good with actors (in his films, the stronger actors usually seem straitjacketed, and the weaker ones are just flailing), and seems to have recognized that writing isn’t her strong suit.
I loved this film. And I agree with Joey – I don’t think he could see anything else to do with his life.
It’s strange—I thought this was an excellent, powerful movie even as the sad cynical-moviegoer part of my brain ticked off war-movie tropes while watching it: The terrified young soldier being calmed by the crazy-cool vet, the cute-kid base rat, the desk-jockey shrink colonel who is doomed the second he steps from behind that desk (as soon as mention was made of him joining them on a mission one day, I thought YOU. ARE. A. DEAD. MAN.).
It’s a testament to Bigelow’s tight, kinetic direction and the uniformly excellent acting (especially by Mackie) that the movie worked so well for me. (I wonder what it says about me, though, that my favorite scene was the one where the other two soldiers momentarily entertain the idea of killing James.)
Add me to the long list of people who want to see the cereal-aisle scene retired (yeah, I GET it; you don’t need to hammer our mindless, conspicuous consumption home by shooting up at the cereal boxes from the floor at the corner of the facing aisle). Especially because that scene can NEVER be done better than it was in “Double Indemnity” or “Manhunter.”
I wonder if the ending, with James walking off to live the only life he’s wired for, might have been a little more powerful if the movie hadn’t short-sold his home life so efficiently. Because, damn, who WOULD want the life he goes home to? How is that a meaningful contest? But I know; Bigelow had maybe 5 minutes to encapsulate his home life. And I’m not proud of this (I tend to consider it more of a personal failing), but I often have a problem when directors cast familiar actors in cameos—I kept thinking “Wait; Kate had a baby?! Is it Sawyer’s or Jack’s?!”
In other news, Jeremy Renner is my new army-haircut boyfriend. The Iraqi sun isn’t the only thing in that movie that’s scorching. DAMN.
Just finished watching (the Netflix gods were kind to me) and I agree, the scenes at the end needed trimming. I did, however, see the cereal aisle scene differently. I didn’t see him looking at disdain of the land of plenty so much as just being undecided. This is a guy who makes split-second life or death situations but he can’t pick out what kind of cereal to buy. It was a beautiful setup to the end: he belongs in that suit.
I hate how everyone feels compelled to put neon lights on Bigelow being female and directing a war movie at that, how novel, gosh golly. But. I did feel a swell of glee when he name came up to that badass music.
“Even though he had a cute kid and a wife who looked like Evangeline Lilly,”
Just wanted to point out that his wife IS Evangeline Lilly.
Yes, I’m a total nerd who yelled “OMG! KATE!”