A Classic Study of Men in Combat and the Toll it Takes

Released by: Summit Entertainment
DVD Release Date: January 12, 2010
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay: Marl Boal
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Guy Pierce

The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (to use the increasingly forgotten Rumsfeldian formulation) never really got their moment in Hollywood: a big movie whose unembarrassed purpose is to endorse the military action. Most of the serious responses have been liberal-patriot fence-straddlers, multistranded stories urgently set in Washington, the Middle East, south Asia and elsewhere, tying themselves in knots in an attempt to acknowledge a dovey, covert point of view- pictures such as Stephen Gaghan's incendiary Syriana, Robert Redford's forgotten Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood's little-seen Rendition, and Peter Berg's flop The Kingdom. The best and most insightful anti-war film about Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow's blazingly powerful action movie, The Hurt Locker, makes for a refreshing change.
Bigelow is, in dramatic terms, on the side of the soldiers. Not that the soldiers are all on the same page. The Hurt Locker focuses on three men whose contrasting temperaments knit this episodic exploration of peril and bravery into a coherent and satisfying story. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a bundle of nerves and confused impulses, eager to please, ashamed of his own fear and almost dismayingly vulnerable. Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie in a terrific performance) is a careful, uncomplaining professional who sticks to protocol and procedures in the hope that his prudence will get him home alive, away from an assignment he has come to loathe.
Written by Mark Boal, a journalist for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Playboy, which ran a story that Paul Haggis expanded into one of the sharpest Iraq-related dramas, In the Valley of Elah, it is set in 2004 and follows the members of an elite US bomb-disposal team as they move across the debris-littered streets of Baghdad looking for explosive devices to defuse. After one of them is blown up, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives on the scene.
It turns out he’s something of a wild card, a fearless operator who virtually runs to sites of maximum danger, disregarding the advice of colleagues. A smoker and a heavy metal fan with an irreverent sense of humor and a relaxed sense of military discipline, he approaches each new bomb or skirmish not with dread but with a kind of inspired, improvisational zeal. As he gropes for the wires that will ignite a massive car bomb or traces a spider-weblike cluster of shells buried under a street, he looks like a man having the time of his life. Sanborn, as if to prove that race and class are incendiary issues even for a squad unified by shared objectives, calls him a “red-neck piece of trailer trash” and punches him out. At one point, Sanborn and Eldridge even speculate about killing James, but over time they develop respect if not admiration for his unconventional methods. When they discover that he keeps parts of old bombs under his bed as macabre spoils of war, it’s clear that he’s someone for whom the quotation that prefaces the film- about war being the ultimate drug- is a truism.
As this three-man squad progresses from terrifying situation to more terrifying situation, we experience not only breathless action but also the development of what might be called a philosophical rivalry between the two sergeants about the best way to be a brave and effective soldier. It's not an abstract question, it's one that could determine who will live and who will die.
In some ways, Bigelow's film repudiates the conventions of narrative: it could be seen as simply a series of unbearably tense vignettes. In one bizarre but intestine-wrenching scene, James and his men come across some loose-cannon Brits, led by Ralph Fiennes, who almost earns them some fatal friendly fire. The encounter, inevitably, winds up in a wild west shoot-out that has a surreally drawn-out, hallucinatory quality. Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces.
The Hurt Locker excels though at making us feel that we are stranded alone with the bomb squad in a landscape full of unknown and potentially infinite dangers. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, well atuned to realistic photography as evidenced by his awesome work in United 93, makes telling use of grainy, often handheld photography that recalls the jittery, verite pictures of this conflict that have emerged through channels such as YouTube. It also conveys the nervousness and paranoia the Americans may feel when every passing butcher, DVD-vendor or taxi-driver could be an insurgent-in-waiting. Also of the highest order is Paul N.J. Ottoson’s sound design which renders an unforgettable sonic portrait of Baghdad, a ghosted city full of eerie silences and insidious whispers punctuated by military sirens, the stentorian roar of US soldiers, and the noise of metal ripping through human flesh.
With muscular direction, Bigelow is strong on the psychology and dynamics of male bonding. The scene in which the men get drunk and start wrestling are captured in all their muscular, playful, erotic intensity. When James feeds juice to Sanborn, wilting after hours in the desert peering through binoculars at a distant combatant, he does so with a delicacy that seems to be borne of more than camaraderie or necessity, but from a love that only men who have risked their lives together on a frontline can ever truly appreciate.
One of the most unexpected things about the film is that, unlike many war films, it is not interested in having you choose sides. In fact, it reveals humanisitc things about its characters, especially James, like the sergeant's playfulness with a young Iraqi boy (Christopher Sayegh) who calls himself Beckham and says things like "I hook you up!" Renner handles all sides of his surprisingly complex character beautifully, in a performance so good it feels like a gift.
Finally, almost without our realizing it, the film asks difficult questions about heroism's costs and demands, about what war does to soldiers, and about damage that may be impossible to rectify or repair. Like every war before it, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has generated its share of movies, but The Hurt Locker is the first of them that can properly be called a masterpiece. Considered a front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar when the nominations are revealed in February, Bigelow could be honoured with the award for Directing becoming the first woman to ever receive the award. (Ironic considering that the war film genre is male-dominated.) Here's to hoping her and her film will be honoured.