"The Hurt Locker" - REVIEW

My only word of warning about Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is that it probably will leave you drained and exhausted. Aside from that, the only other thing I would say, is that you should look and see if the film is playing in your city, and if it is, go to the next showing; waste no time. If you have the chance to see this art house war film on the big screen, then do so. You may be left stumbling out of the theater in exhaustion after the 2 hours are over, but it will have been worth it, to see what is not just the best American film to come out this year so far, but the best film to come out this year, PERIOD.

It opens with a bomb squad that we spend just about the entire film with. The setting is Baghdad circa 2004. We hear and see the troops clearing the streets and the bomb squad goes to work, both aprehensive about the danger ahead, but also able to joke to each other. In this opening scene it's instantly clear how commanding Bigelow's direction is. She's making a "man's movie" better than most men. Equally impressive is Mark Boal's un-preachy, pretention-free screenplay. The only "message" the the movie carries is relevant only to some of the people in the movie: war is a drug. Save for one or two stylized slow-motion shots of pebbles being lifted into the air by an explosion, there is no "gloss". To quote Mick LaSalle's review, "[Bigelow] uses hand-held cameras in The Hurt Locker, not to make viewers dizzy or to instill excitement that isn't there, but to create a subtle sense of being alongside the characters. Her camera doesn't shake. It breathes. It pulses." And he's dead right. There is no forced excitement, no obnoxious shaking of the camera just to appear "gritty" (I'm looking at you, "Quantum of Solace"), but a real purpose. The camera is our guide. It is our way of looking into the lives of these men as they face scary-as-hell situations almost daily. There are no elegant crane shots or artfully composed landscape vistas. At any given moment the camera might move, even if it's only a little, just to keep you firmly planted in the movie's world. The same applies to the music. There is no "theme" or over-bearing tones that always play "just in time" to let us know that something is about to happen. It is heard infrequently, and when it IS heard, it is totally unobtrusive.

Of course, all of this would be wasted if the main characters were assigned to poor actors, but this is not the case. While accomplished actors like Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes have cameo appearences, the real protagonists here are Sergeants William James (Jeremy Renner), JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Never heard of them? Join the club. James is something of a "wild man". Example: he takes his helmet and most of his gear off in the middle of a search through a suspicious car. His reason? "I'm probably gonna die...and I want to be comfortable when I do." Such behavior doesn't sit well with Sanborn, who doesn't like what he sees as James' total recklessness. Needless to say, they don't start of as the best of friends. The third man, Eldridge, has a problem of his own. He feels that he's going to die in Iraq no matter what...and he just wants to make sure he does it while fighting. As he tells an Army doctor, "I want to die with some real honor" (I'm really loosley paraphrasing there). These three are the heart of the film, particularly Mr. Renner. Seems like the perfect way to set up some heavy duty male bonding and then tear it all apart with some ugly tear-jerking. However, Bigelow and Boal have different plans for us. They never indulge in sentimentality. They never build characters up just for the purpose of being taken down to make us shed a cheap tear. Of course, these characters are fictional, but to me they might as well have been real people, and the script treats them as real people, and for that, I cannot praise the film enough. The performances are as real as the tension, which is considerable but never artificially "enhanced". The screenplay has a raw intelligence that fits beautifully with Bigelow's direction, and as I said, there is no obnoxious preaching or heavy handed symbolism.

As you may remember, 2007 was the year that Hollywood tried to really get us to see films about the war in Iraq and, well...it didn't go so well. Even the "best" of them were preachy, and looked at the war mostly from the standpoint of people far removed from combat. And then, just two years later, another Iraq War film, one smart enough to drop the preaching and just show us how scary war is comes along and blows them all away. And to think, that all it needed was a woman's touch...

Grade: A