Hurt Me

Director Kathryn Bigelow made a name for herself thirty years ago as a Columbia film student with her thesis, a twenty minute scene of two guys beating each other up in an alley as two Semioticians deconstructed the lure of cinematic violence on the soundtrack. As a friend of mine pointed out, a similar scene of two men pounding on each other is a highlight (and humorous respite) in the middle of her current release, The Hurt Locker, while the deconstruction is now all in the rest of the pictures. Taking place during the most lethal stretch of our Iraq occupation, the film is, one one hand, an essay-like deconstruction of what it takes to be a risk-addicted soldier specifically trained and tasked to disarm IED's, the bombs anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgents use(d) to blow us up. On the other hand the movie is a highly successful entry into what may be my favorite genre, the serious action film actually about something real and significant.

Emphasis now on the action and, from the very first scene, monumental suspense.

I've had my issues with Bigelow's films in the past. Her proto-True Blood indie vampire flick, Near Dark, made her the potential punk crossover director to watch. However her follow up, Blue Steel, was made laborious with it's use of metronomically cut static/graphic shots and a plot that collapsed into numbing cliche by the end. She can be credited with giving us the compulsively watchable Point Break, which also gave us the Keanu Reeves persona that paid off in The Matrix, and while she's filled in with some admirable television directing assignments, her ensuing films seem mainly ill-fated.

Until now.

One hopes that Bigelow is at the start of a streak, because all of her talents and unique style -- often confused with being a "male" style when it's much more clinical, perhaps that of a woman fascinated like an anthropologist with male rituals and camaraderie -- have paid off. The superlatives are easy to come by. This is easily the most entertaining movie made about the Iraq conflict, without sacrificing an ounce of realism, and for me the best American movie I've seen in a theater this year. She's also introduced a new star, lead actor Jeremy Renner, and gotten a career-best performance (thus far) from Anthony Mackie.

What makes The Hurt Locker work starts with the setting, which is essentially a 24-hour livewire situation where literally anyone not in an American army uniform can be a deadly enemy, whether the local merchant or the kid with the soccer ball. The picture is structured as a series of high-suspense set pieces, each one essentially an escalating variation on man vs. bomb (or insurgent). By very nature this is a looping existential situation, where literally one moment to the next can be there you see him, there you don't. The actual story engine is a classic platoon tale, where a hotshot cowboy (Renner) joins Mackie and crew as team leader, a.k.a. the man in the barely protective bomb suit with the fingers free and vulnerable so they can do the detail work on the bombs themselves. And at the center is Renner's character, who is clearly better at war than he is at peace, which may be more dooming to him than any shrapnel.

One of the tricks and grammatical tropes of the movie is how we learn the geography of the bomb experts world, what it means to be 200, 100, 50 meters away. Bigelow does an expert job of keeping the geography straight in each individual set piece, no small feat considering the you-are-there handheld documentary shooting style. Another piece of grammar that grew with the picture is how during the defusion scenes there will be a cut to the point of view behind a high window, indicating that we're likely with someone who has the ability to detonate the bomb, locking the dread factor right in place.

I won't be surprised to see The Hurt Locker deconstructed further by filmmakers in the future who want to figure out how to put together their own action sequences for maximum impact. How did she do that will be the question each time, and one hopes they have a fraction of the serious content that Bigelow reveals. While there is nothing right/left partisan in the picture and no spoken words of political positioning, there are those moments where you just start asking yourself, if this is such a seemingly low value environment in the first place and everyone around seems so damned hostile to us, why the hell did we come here in the first place?

Finally there's the substance of the main character. Screenwriter Mark Boal was an embedded journalist in the Iraq War, which is what gives the characters and situations their foundation in reality. For Boal and Bigelow the courage of these servicemen and the lead in particular is unassailable. One could even interpret the ending of the film as as gung-ho as Top Gun, but which I believe would be missing the obvious point. Yes, these are America's bravest and most willing to sacrifice; however there's something about either what made them want to be there or something about the experience of the war that changes them, something that makes them not 100% whole as a human being. And it's that chasing after a piece that makes an IED defusion specialist.

The most reassuring aspect of the movie is that when the main character settles in we know he's the able rebel, the kind of John Ford character who can break the frontier where others can't, but will never be comfortable as a settler. As enigmatic as his character's inner life might be, we know him from movies of yore, he's in our cinematic DNA. It's to Bigelow and Boal's credit that we learn something new about this character, as grounded by the context of our nation's Iraq experience.

For larger metaphors you can take what you will, but if you're looking for the most gripping action film of the summer, it ain't Transformers 2.