Feeding the Danger Habit   

Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

THE HURT LOCKER, Summit Entertainment, 2008
Review by David Sterritt

The Hurt Locker, a technically brilliant film about American combat in Iraq, was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who developed her action-movie skills in the early 1990s with pictures like the cop melodrama Blue Steel and the crime 'n' surfing yarn Point Break. Her new film takes its title from military slang in the Iraq war-slang meaning the box you'll be in if danger catches you off guard. The movie's highly authentic atmosphere comes partly from the docudrama urgency of Bigelow's shaky-cam visual style and partly from the screenplay by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded for a couple of weeks with a U.S. Army explosive-disposal unit in Iraq, like the one portrayed in the film.

The story centers on a three-man bomb squad, and the opening scene tells everything you need to know about their job. When someone alerts them to a roadside bomb, booby trap, or other explosive hazard, they rush to the location and send in a wheeled robot-complete with video transmitter and remote-controlled claw-to examine the object up close. Then the squad leader puts on protective armor, walks into the danger zone, and disarms the device by hand, while his heavily armed teammates scan the area for additional threats. When all goes well, the squad then relaxes and awaits the next assignment, which never takes long to arrive. When things go wrong, the consequences are horrific, as in the opening scene, when the soldiers don't spot an Iraqi with a remote detonator until he's about to trigger the bomb, which kills the team leader despite his heavy-duty blast suit. This is a harrowingly suspenseful episode, acted and photographed with great attention to naturalistic detail, and edited with razor-sharp timing.

After a quick scene registering grief at the team leader's death, the movie introduces his replacement: Staff Sergeant William James, a young officer with extensive bomb-squad experience. Soon he and his teammates, Sergeant JT Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge, race to their first operation together, and it's like the one we just saw, except that the new leader's modus operandi is very different from that of his predecessor. Instead of sending in a robot, he puts on blast armor and strides nonchalantly toward the explosive as if he were walking into his favorite bar. Along the way he sets off a smoke device to confuse any enemies who might be watching, thus cutting off his teammates' vision too. He pulls off the job successfully, but Sanborn and Eldridge are furious at the way he put the mission-not to mention their lives-unnecessarily at risk.

And so it goes for the rest of the movie. Whether it's an ambush in the desert, an intricately wired car bomb, or an explosive charge packed into the entrails of a young Iraqi's corpse, James swaggers into the thick of things while Sanborn and Eldridge fidget on the sidelines, trying to protect a guy who doesn't like protection. At one point they grow so frustrated with James's bravado that they consider killing him, if only to save their own skins from constant exposure to needless jeopardy. They decide against this solution, hoping they can survive until their tour of duty is finished, but it isn't easy. What can you do with a man who defuses deadly bombs the way other people play video games, and throws off his body armor when he gets to feeling warm?

The most unusual aspect of The Hurt Locker is its structure, relentlessly hurtling from one crisis to another, hardly ever pausing for a glance at psychology, much less a glimpse of politics. Boal has likened the picture to Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 classic about Vietnam, saying both movies have an episodic format that's true to the existential realities of war. Maybe so, but Coppola's film packs an enormous number of ideas-some intelligent, some not-into its ambitious story line. By contrast, each episode of The Hurt Locker is a marvelously wrought specimen of suspense-movie technique, and that's all it is. Only near the end, in a brief scene showing James back home with his wife and baby, do we get a sense of who he is and how profoundly he's addicted to danger. This appears to be the movie's message: that some people crave deadly peril the way others crave alcohol or gambling, and that front-line military service feeds the danger habit while extracting social value from it. It's hardly a dazzling insight, even when fleshed out by Bigelow's ingenious filmmaking.

If the psychology of The Hurt Locker is skin deep, its politics are shallower still-or rather, it doesn't have any politics beyond the war-movie cliché that in the fog of war a soldier's main job is to get the job done without worrying about whys and wherefores. In a New Yorker interview, Boal said he didn't want his characters "standing up and giving speeches" because "you're probably not thinking about the geopolitics of oil when you're standing over a bomb." Does that mean the rest of us shouldn't think about geopolitics either? Boal takes the same attitude Steven Soderbergh took when he made Che-that in a war movie, talk only slows the action down-so it's little wonder The Hurt Locker gives little insight into why James and his team behave the way they do. The picture shows even less interest in who's planting all the explosives and what their motivations might be. They are just "Iraqis," and they're pushed into the margins throughout the film, never developed beyond bit-part caricatures.

The political and psychological shortcomings of The Hurt Locker are surprising, because Boal's earlier work includes "Death and Dishonor," a Playboy article about the murder of an Iraq war veteran near Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2003, which was the basis for In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis in 2007. Named after the location of the biblical fight between David and Goliath, that picture starred Tommy Lee Jones as an aging army veteran whose son, recently returned from fighting in Iraq, has been savagely murdered. Looking for culprits and reasons, the hero learns one poisonous truth after another about the war's toxic effects on American soldiers. The movie is an honest and outspoken indictment of the conflict's unconscionable human costs, and I wish Boal's screenplay for The Hurt Locker didn't veer in such a different direction.

The Hurt Locker is splendidly directed by Bigelow, however, and richly acted by a terrific cast. Jeremy Renner, best known for his TV work, emerges as a sharp and subtle actor despite the limitations of the script. Ditto for Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, who play Sanborn and Eldridge, and Nabil Koni makes an indelible impression as a gentle Iraqi professor who deserves much more screen time than he's given. Christian Camargo is persuasive as Colonel John Cambridge, a military psychiatrist whose mini-sessions with selected soldiers give the movie what little psychology it has, and Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce make brief appearances that will please their fans. On every technical level, The Hurt Locker is a striking achievement. But its evasion of deep issues and hard questions makes it the most sorely missed opportunity so far this year.

David Sterritt, Tikkun's film critic, is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest books are Guiltless Pleasures and The B List.