Solyaris

Or, Sea you in my dreams.

Soviet art occupies a very intriguing place in world history. Because it was formed and informed by a culture that had never existed before and never will again, it possesses a uniqueness that is very attractive. It’s all the more attractive because the communist aesthetic was never parochial. It always spoke, by design, to all peoples in all times.

Solyaris (1972, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky) is a gorgeous mess of a film. Its physical beauty and intellectual depth, and its reliance on those virtues to the exclusion of others, don’t really recommend it to most people. Tarkovsky has always made me think of Tim Burton–a talented visual stylist who isn’t always proficient at the basic filmmaking practice of having a beginning, a middle and an end.

Its length (almost three hours) also doesn't really recommend it to most people. Is it boring? Well, it's three hours long, and I will admit that there may have been a point where I considered whether sorting my laundry might be more exciting than watching whatever part of the movie was on right then. 

On the other hand, I’ve never really thought that boring is the worst epithet you can apply to a movie. If you can watch orcs, dwarves, and elves go at it for over an hour in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, surely you can put up with five minutes of Henri Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) riding on the futuristic freeways of Tokyo. Not only is Solyaris a stunningly beautiful movie from a cinematographic point of view, but the sound design is quite unique as well. Many of the framings and sounds do not recall any Western movie that I can think of. This is a movie that is not only worth seeing, but also listening to.

While the movie may be very intellectual, the plot is not particularly complicated. The planet Solaris is covered by an ocean that scientists think may be sentient, but after decades of research all attempts to communicate with it have failed. Only three scientists are left on the research station, and one of them has died. Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is being sent to replace him.

I wondered whether the science of “Solaristics” was a stand-in for Communism itself–a discipline which once showed tremendous promise, but which nobody really believes in any more. 

The first part of the movie takes place at Kelvin’s parents’ house as he prepares to leave. This may actually be the most evocative; before we encounter the sentient ocean of Solaris, the very first images we see are closeups of the lake by the house. The fact that the house stands alone, surrounded by water, already prefigures the film’s ending.

When Kelvin gets to the station, he finds a beautiful wreck, like a motorcycle gang trashed the Discovery One from 2001–A Space Odyssey. The other scientists, Dr. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Dr. Sartorius (Anatoly Solonitsyn) are behaving rather oddly. 

Solyaris may have its dull moments, but you can’t really accuse it of being obfuscatory or “experimental.” The fundamental problem is very clearly explained: the ocean is bringing the dreams of the station's inhabitants to life, and not in a nice, friendly way. 

In Kelvin’s case, the ocean brings back his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who killed herself ten years before, when Kelvin left her. The reincarnated Hari is not a hallucination (the other scientists can see her), but she isn’t quite real, either. The immortal "guests" torture their hosts by their very existence, and then, as Hari starts to realize what she is, she begins to torture herself. This is really the point when the film starts to catch fire, and Bondarchuk's performance is very impressive. Although not a computer, she is also a sort of HAL 9000, an artificial creation that believes itself to be more than that. Unlike HAL, though, Hari may turn out to be the most human being on the station.

What's Solyaris really about? Well, there’s certainly a lot of philosophical chatter among the scientists–the discussion scene in the library made me think of Woody Allen’s Russian film parody Love and Death–but the exact meaning leaves just enough of an opening for the viewer to insert him- or herself into the debate. The original book by Stanislaw Lem is about the inevitable failure of communication with other life forms, but although the movie does do some lip service to this (Dr. Snaut: “We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror”) it feels like it doesn’t really believe it. 

The fact that Kelvin gradually comes to embrace a second chance at his relationship with Hari, and the fact that guest/ghost Hari gradually comes to feel her humanity, point more in the opposite direction. Since Hari is a creation of the ocean, the fact that she and Kelvin become close despite the obstacles between them points vaguely in the direction of the possibility of interspecies communication. 

My interpretation of a movie like this, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that I finished it with a desire to go out for coffee and discuss it with somebody else. 

There is plenty to criticize, if you want to. Viewers from the future of 2015 may snicker at the dwarf that toddles out from Sartorius's lab, or Dr. Kelvin’s ohhhhhh myyyyyy-inducing mesh shirt, but for a movie from 1972, it’s surprisingly rewarding for a modern viewer with a lot of patience. But know your own limits. If a three-hour movie with long takes and a lot of intellectual discussion doesn’t sound like your cup of chai, then this probably won’t be the one that changes your mind.

Cloud Atlas

Or, you can't makeup this sh*t.

If you were going to make a movie of David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas, a huge, sprawling epic of interwoven stories, the directors of The Matrix and Run Lola Run might seem like just the people to do it. But to make a long story short, three's a crowd and too many cooks spoil the broth.

Cloud Atlas isn't shy about its fundamental premise of eternal recurrence. It says we humans keep fighting the same battles, in every society, in every age. The big challenge in a movie like this is usually tying everything together so the audience doesn't feel drawn and quartered by the storyline. Cloud Atlas does this fairly well. The transitions between stories are intriguing; one transition, mediated by the transformation of the clickety-clack of a train into the hoofbeats of an enemy, is particularly Hitchcockian. 

It would be understandable if Cloud Atlas chose to recast some of the same actors in different parts in different stories, as well, in order to underscore the connections between them. But it actually goes further than that. The same handful of actors actually play every major character, in every story, in every historical era.

This is a very high-stakes gambit, and I can see why it might be a very attractive challenge to any capable director, and why it would be extremely appealing to any talented actor. The best actors are revealed when they play against type. I spent years rolling my eyes at George Clooney's alpha-male swagger, until I saw him play a loser in Michael Clayton and believed him. Personally, I think Cate Blanchett's greatest triumph isn't Elizabeth, but Pushing Tin, in which she plays a Long Island housewife. I'm from Noo Yawk myself, so I should know.

I can even see how it might be tempting to push this acting exercise even further, and ask the actors to play characters of a different gender or a different race. One of the directors, Lana Wachowski, used to be Larry Wachowski, so I truly sympathize with her desire to prove that it is possible for us to become anyone that we truly want to become; that if we truly radiate femininity from the inside out it doesn't matter what our exterior objectively is.

To some extent, the failure of this experiment has to be laid at the feet of the makeup department, because in most cases the actors just look like they’re wearing Halloween masks. However, some of the actors have to take their lumps as well. After all, all Hugh Grant has to do is fake a credible American accent in one scene, and he fails spectacularly.

Hugo Weaving, who has to play Nurse Ratched to a bunch of unjustly imprisoned geezers, just doesn't have the femininity of Lana Wachowski, and simply comes off like a man in a drag. That’s no small irony, considering that the first movie I ever saw him in was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The cross-gender casting is not very successful here, but it's been pulled off before (The Crying Game, anyone?) The cross-racial casting, on the other hand, ranges from the merely clumsy to the totally disastrous. Every time it happens, you can't help thinking, "is that..." and it takes you completely out of the movie. Halle Berry, for instance, looks profoundly uncomfortable as a blond Jewish woman. Actually, since I'm Jewish, I'm not sure who's more uncomfortable–her or me. 

Jim Sturgess has his eyes almondized to play Korean insurgent Hae-Joo Chang. While Sturgess deserves credit for pulling this trick off better than his colleagues, having a white actor play an Asian character seems at best historically ignorant and at worst brazenly offensive. It's creepily reminiscent of the early days in Hollywood, where Richard Barthelmess played a Chinese shopkeeper in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. To be fair, in Cloud Atlas Asian actors also play white characters–and fail just as miserably.

Ironically, Broken Blossoms is very much like Cloud Atlas in that it means so well and fails so miserably in its progressive desires. After all, in an ideal world, wouldn't all casting be race-blind and even gender-blind? When the crew of the Enterprise puts on Death of a Salesman in the rec room, maybe Uhura plays Willy Loman opposite Sulu as Linda. (Irony alert #2: Avery Brooks, who played Captain Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has played Willy Loman.)

The thing is that this will only work when we can do it without the makeup. 

Fruitvale Station

Or, A Dealer and a Gentleman.

You'd expect a movie about the shooting of a young black man by a white transit officer to be about race. Fruitvale Station might be the best movie on the subject since Do the Right Thing–but it's so different. 

Fruitvale Station has none of that film’s flaming, righteous fury. If its moments are smaller, though, they are actually more powerful and more realistic. As a result, it manages to be a profoundly sad and profoundly optimistic movie at the same time. It's a pretty hard hat trick to pull off, and director Ryan Coogler deserves a lot of credit for it.

The movie is framed by the last day of Oscar Grant’s life. This is a brilliant conceit because it allows Coogler to show Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) as the ordinary, complicated, conflicted, imperfect human being that all 22-year-old men are. Michael B. Jordan recently starred in Chronicle, another very clever and affecting movie about young men and their mistakes, and he does a good job of making Oscar likeable. Not an antihero or a lovable cad, just a young man who’s made mistakes–big ones–and continues to make them, but certainly doesn't deserve to die for it.

On New Year’s Eve Oscar is on the knife’s edge. Sure, he’s a drug dealer and serial cheater on his Latina girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), but he’s also genuinely trying to go straight. Of course we’ve seen this scenario many times before, but Fruitvale Station departs from the formula. 

It’s clear from the narrative that if Oscar hadn’t died that night he would have made it, and that’s a big part of the tragedy. In another movie, Oscar would either fail because the world was stacked against a young black man, or succeed because of his sheer individual grit and determination. In Fruitvale Station, Oscar is a nice guy, but he’s no hero. He’s going to make it because he has a rainbow of supporters who believe in him and are helping him out. 

There’s his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer), who withholds a hug in prison and saves him, and is punished by being denied a hug in the hospital after he dies; Sophina, who could have turned into a harpy when he admits he’s been lying to her about losing his job but instead chooses to stand by him; and the white web developer who Oscar does a small favor for, and promises to return it many times over.

Maybe that moment, which implies that had Oscar lived this might have been his future, is patronizing, platitudinous and poetic in equal measure. Fruitvale Station is not perfect or without its clumsy moments. There’s a scene where Oscar’s daughter Tatiana (the adorable Ariana Neal) worries about him leaving because she thinks the fireworks sound like gunshots. That feels a little like a sledgehammer blow to the face, especially considering an earlier shot of white kids holding fireworks that has already made the same point.

On the other hand, I don’t want to subscribe to the theory that I don’t like symbolism unless it goes over my head. Coogler has gotten some flak for a scene in which Oscar befriends a stray pit bull which then gets run over. I'm not sure if the problem is that this never actually happened (don’t we all understand what “based on a true story” means?) or the symbolism is too on-the-nose (young black men are like pit bulls, get it?) This feels a little like the way design snobs criticize Ikea because it allows the plebs to have stylish furniture. Just because Fruitvale Station is an indie movie with a low budget and cinematography that’s a little rough around the edges doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accessible to the same audience as the summer blockbuster playing in the auditorium next door.

This optimistic view of the world, in which the only people who truly see the world in black and white are the police–and even they get a moment of understanding, surrounded by an uncooperative, angry mob–feels very much inspired by the Bay Area, where a scene in which a gorgeous crazy quilt of revelers ends up celebrating the New Year stuck on a BART train feels like it’s celebrating the best of us. As does the scene in which Oscar gives a young white woman advice on how to fry fish. Actress Ahna O’Reilly does a great job of conveying that particular off-balance feeling well-meaning white people have when talking to a black person they don’t know, and you could feel the amusement in the auditorium, the white viewers chuckling in shared embarrassment, the black viewers chuckling in shared recognition. Maybe that’s why it’s so appropriate that BART should play such a major role in the movie–frankly, it should have a screen credit. 

Maybe it won’t resonate elsewhere, and Fruitvale Station will be just another racial litmus test. That would be a real shame, because it has a beautiful, if somewhat flawed, vision–and if that’s not a metaphor for our country right there, I don’t know what is.

Footnote

Or, tough Talmudder.

Footnote is one of those foreign movies that is bound to frustrate the average moviegoer with its slow-moving plot, flawed and unlikable characters, and unsatisfying resolution. Israeli director Joseph Cedar follows up his film Beaufort, about the last days of the first Israel-Lebanon war, with a very introverted movie about a father-and-son pair of Talmudic scholars.

The setup makes it sound like a comedy: father Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-abba) has been repeatedly passed over for awards and accolades, while son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is drowning in them. The father is told he's going to receive the prestigious Israel Prize, but it turns out there's been a mistake and they actually meant to give it to the son. Hijinks follow. Self-absorbed, socially inept academics are mocked.

In reality, the few tentative madcap scenes in the movie feel dreadfully out of place, and the constant comic music is annoying. Eliezer is extremely bitter: at the beginning of the film, Uriel is being admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. The camera stays on Eliezer's miserable face during the entire scene. He can barely bring himself to applaud (literally) his son's tremendous achievement.

Admission is a key theme of the movie--it's all about who "gets in" and who doesn't. Eliezer wanders outside during the reception and the guard won't let him back in. Many scenes feature security checkpoints, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they're in there simply because they're a fundamental feature of Israeli life, but their secondary meaning is important as well. They represent the exclusion that Eliezer feels, and on another level, that Israelis feel from the rest of the world.

Eliezer is the typical socially inept academic, but this isn't played for laughs. It quickly becomes clear through the editing that he is autistic. He is overwhelmed by situations of sensory excess and categorizes things obsessively. He comes home and puts on those earmuffs that airport workers wear to exclude the outside world–it is ironic that he craves recognition but is incapable of handling it when it comes. Cedar elegantly shows how he focuses on small details but the big picture of what's going on around him is elusive.

This ability to live in the details actually makes him a great scholar in some ways, but clearly hinders him in other ways. The tension between father and son is not just about their charisma (which Uriel has and Eliezer does not), but also about the nature of science and scholarship–to Eliezer, the new generation of scholars seem lazy, sloppy and distracted by shiny details. To the other scholars, Eliezer lacks creativity and is unproductive–his main achievement is being mentioned in a footnote by an earlier genius in the Talmudic field.

Eliezer uses the opportunity of winning the prize to lash out at his son in a spectacularly ungrateful manner, but Uriel is hardly a saint either. Towards the beginning the film takes a detour, listing random facts about both Eliezer and Uriel that help fill out their characters, and Uriel is revealed to be petty and tyrannical. It's meant to be funny, but the visual effects, which mimic the microfilm readers that the Talmudic scholars use, are distracting. 

A more interesting and less contrived window into Uriel's character is provided by his family. When Eliezer attacks Uriel, Uriel turns around and unleashes his pent-up fury on his own son Josh (Daniel Markovich). Uriel's perceptive wife Dikla (Alma Zack)  is clearly the only person who sees him for who he truly is and isn't afraid to tell him so. Dikla almost runs away with the movie–she provides a much-needed respite from the intense, cloistered world of the scholars.

Overall the herky-jerky pacing, the uncomfortable mix of comedy and drama, and the unnecessary effects bring the film down, and there are places where a lack of knowledge of Hebrew philology is a hindrance; one plot point hinges on the fact that in Hebrew, "Ezekiel" and "Uriel" begin with the same letter. But while there are some missteps, the film is neither slight nor silly–you may find that it is more interesting after the fact than in the watching. 

Plus, if you don't mind foreign films without proper resolution, you

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Or, Tekka Piece of My Heart, Baby.

Amazon's description of this film is a meditation on work and perfection. I'm not really fond of the word meditation to describe a film–it seems to be code for this movie has no story and no structure, but it is sort of loosely about some big amorphous theme like love or loss or California or whatever. See here and here and here and here and here. And here and here and here. So to more comprehensively describe this movie, perhaps it should be called a meditation on work and perfection, with a short, preachy digression on overfishing. 

Jiro Ono owns a sushi restaurant located in a Tokyo subway station which has three Michelin stars. He has spent his entire life doing nothing but making sushi. The film would seem to say that this is the recipe for getting to the top of any field–endless, singleminded practice and dedication. It seems very Japanese, and at first it appears to be a lesson that we spastic Americans, changeable as the weather, unfocused and impetuous, could really use.

On the other hand, that's kind of the movie's biggest problem. There really is nothing to Jiro except sushi. He does, in fact, dream of sushi, and always has. He pontificates endlessly to camera, to the point where the film, with its heavily Philip Glass-infused score, begins to seem like a food-porn version of Errol Morris's The Fog of War.

The food photography is in fact sublime, and for a while, just watching the balletic preparation of the fish is enough. But even that wears thin, and the tiny restaurant begins to seem claustrophobic. As if it realizes this, the film leaves the restaurant and begins to meander, meditating endlessly on every aspect of sushi. It heads out to the fish market to chat with the fish vendors, who have nothing much interesting to say–their secret is nothing more and nothing less than a relentless, lifelong search for quality. We learn about the extra pressure on the rice, the massaging of the octopus, the difficulty of cooking the egg. Thankfully the film spares us the exquisite care with which the apprentices wash the pots, or the exquisitely choreographed bathroom breaks.

The film goes home with Jiro to the small town where he grew up, where the quality of the cinematography drops and Jiro chats with a few childhood acquaintances. If Jiro had been interesting enough, we might have wanted to know more about him; but the only thing we might really be curious to know is why sushi captured his life this way, and not airplanes or yoga or construction; and that question is never really answered, or even addressed. 

What saves the film is the minor characters–the restaurant critic Masuhiro Yamamoto, the apprentice Nakazawa, and Jiro's sons Takashi and Yoshikazu. 

Takashi, the younger son, has been allowed to open his own satellite restaurant. An American might conclude that this means his father believes in him, because he has allowed him to spread his wings. But instead, there is a sense that as the younger son, Takashi is not worthy of inheriting the main restaurant, and so he has actually been given the booby prize. Or maybe it's not his birth order but his culinary skills: his customers seem to regard him as a second-class sushi chef by comparison with his father, but despite this Takashi seems happy with his lot. 

In contrast, his elder brother Yoshikazu is well into middle age and still working for his father. Yoshikazu moves through life with an air of resigned sadness. Jiro takes up all the air in the room. It's as if every laugh of the father squeezes his son's heart. 

The question hanging over the movie is this: what will happen when Jiro, now 85, retires or dies? Yoshikazu is the heir apparent, and he clearly has all of his father's talent, but will that be enough? 

And so at the very last minute, the movie dares to question the subject of its own meditation. Is Jiro is really the world's greatest sushi chef, or has he just managed to create a sort of cult around this bizarre, tiny restaurant tucked into a corner of a subway station?

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Or, Auroch paper scissors.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is not so much a narrative as a collection of images and scenes and character sketches, an attempt to capture a place and time rather than a story per se. In this case, director Benh Zeitlin wants to place us in a grindingly poor, off-the-grid community living on an island called "The Bathtub" off the Louisiana coast. 

Beasts has a Biblical flood (complete with an Ark and animals), and an invasion of extinct cattle straight out of the imagination of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl through whose eyes the audience views this world.

Everything that I've said about the movie so far makes it sound like a Terence Malick movie. Malick makes beautiful movies that make you feel just like you were there...even if watching it's kind of boring and often doesn't make much sense.

For a first-time director with a minuscule budget and a cast of unknowns headed by a six-year-old, Beasts is pretty impressive. But I have to say that the critical French-kissing that it has received is kind of a mystery to me. Many of the reviews can't really seem to say what exactly it is they like. When reviews start waxing all poetic and vague, my BS detector starts beeping. When they declare, as The New Yorker's David Denby did, that its narrative incoherence was actually necessary because if the film made sense it would actually have been worse, that's when it goes into the red.

The only explanation I have is that the dreck that comes out of Hollywood is so mind-numbingly similar that anything that smacks of originality looks like genius, and on that score I have to concede the point to the French-kissing reviewers.

If you asked me whether this movie showed promise, I'd say absolutely, tons. I can't wait to see what Zeitlin does next. If you asked me if Wallis was a good actress, I'd say she was cute, why don't we let her grow up a bit and see if she turns into Dakota Fanning? But Best Picture and Best Director for a first-timer and Best Actress for a six-year-old? Has the critical establishment lost its collective mind? It's one movie. It's too soon. Prizes like this should cap a successful career–not begin one and risk killing it by ego inflation.

So, at the risk of getting an Internet drubbing, I'm going to be the kid calling out the emperor: this film is pretentious, patronizing poverty porn.

No doubt, to a New Yorker like Zeitlin (hey, I'm one too), rural poverty in Louisiana seems downright charming–accents! levees! crawfish!–but like Slumdog Millionaire, I feel like Beasts of the Southern Wild tells us more about our illusions than ourselves. Of course it's true that money can't buy happiness, but to delude your rich, pampered modern self that it's much better to live in poverty and squalor so you can enjoy the spiritual richness is a bit much. 

I'm not telling you that you're not allowed to enjoy it because it's not politically correct, but I think you should ask yourself why you like it. Beasts is like the film equivalent of a Renaissance Fair. If you go into it realizing that there was no dentistry or flush toilets in the real middle ages, you're fine–but in that case, it's not really a soaring religious experience.

Again, let me repeat that it's promising pretentious, patronizing poverty porn, so if you liked the movie we can at least agree on that. But best movie of the year? There, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Zero Dark Thirty/Skyfall

Or, Give My Regards to Langley.

I've realized this week that I'm massively behind in my movie reviewing, and so I asked myself which movies I'd seen recently could co-star in a review. This pairing might seem like an odd double feature, but in a way, Zero Dark Thirty is what a Bond movie might be if the CIA rather than MI-6 was the starring agency. And not only do we have MI-6 facing off against the CIA in this review, we also have two Oscar-winning directors going head-to-head: Sam Mendes for Skyfall, and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. Let the fireworks begin!

James Bond is notorious for his disrespect for legally constituted authority. He does whatever it takes to get his man, and he always does. If he breaks a few laws, or destroys a few buildings, in the process, what of it? Of course, I don't remember James Bond torturing anybody. Perhaps that's because he has been tortured himself, in Casino Royale–a scene that makes Film School Rejects' list of the Ten Best Torture Scenes in American Cinema.

It's possible that Zero Dark Thirty is aiming to push Casino Royale off the list. At the beginning of the movie, Jessica Chastain's CIA agent Maya finds herself witnessing the interrogation of a suspect at a CIA "Black Site." The interrogator, Dan (Jason Clarke) strings him up, parades him around naked, waterboards him, and stuffs him in a small box. The reaction shots of Maya make very clear that she is very uncomfortable watching. But it's not long into the movie before she is eagerly participating in these tactics. 

The movie makes clear that they are necessary because they work. All of the important developments leading to bin Laden are attributed to the torture allowed during the Bush administration. One suspect says: "I don't want to be tortured again," and spills his guts right away. There is even a scene in which President Obama appears on screen declaring an end to the torture of detainees at black sites, and the characters simply look away, as if they are embarrassed by the commander-in-chief. 

If watching the torture scenes makes you uncomfortable, the movie seems to say, you just can't handle the truth. Unlike Bigelow's previous masterpiece, The Hurt Locker, which allowed viewers to choose how they wanted to interpret the politics of the film, Zero Dark Thirty allows no such ambiguity. Every terrorist attack since 9/11 is interwoven into the film–most on television, but a few directly affect the characters. In the film's world, terrorism is very real, very personal, and very threatening. Zero Dark Thirty takes place in a very dark, very imperfect world, and it seems to say that the good guys can't be perfect either.

Skyfall has a very similar and not very deeply hidden political agenda. After Bond's acerbically amusing boss M (Judi Dench) is blamed for losing a maguffin (in this case, a list of undercover agents), the legally constituted authorities call her on the carpet and grill her. One prattling minister proclaims MI-6 completely unnecessary in the modern world. M attempts to claim that there are shadowy threats in the world that MI-6 is necessary to defend the realm against, but the minister doesn't seem to buy it. If you suspect that this blowhard will have the urgent necessity of MI-6 personally demonstrated to her before the movie is out, you will not be disappointed. 

Zero Dark Thirty also has an M of sorts–Joseph Bradley, the CIA station chief (Kyle Chandler). Bradley's role in the movie is the spineless bureaucrat who doesn't believe in Maya's hypothesis that a shadowy figure named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti will lead them to bin Laden, and won't give her the resources to pursue it–until she delivers a rather histrionic soliloquy calling him out and personally attacking him. You wouldn't think this would be the right way to get what you want, but evidently in the CIA it can work. 

Or at least, it works in a movie. It's precisely this kind of Hollywood-playbook plotting that leads me to believe that there's more poetic license than fact in Zero Dark Thirty. Politicians and op-ed columnists have already begun either using the film to underscore their points or attacking it because it undermines them. But it's really irrelevant. Even a movie that's "based on a true story" is still fiction, and it's best treated as such. After all, even James Bond is based on real people that Ian Fleming knew. It's fine to use it as a pretext to open a dialogue about a political subject–movies do that all the time–but treating it as investigative journalism is a huge mistake.

And as fiction, it's beautifully written. Maya is a very compelling heroine, and Bigelow and Chastain easily convince the audience to root for her. First she has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Pakistan to let her pursue Abu Ahmed until he leads her to the Abbottabad complex where bin Laden may be hiding. Then the movie takes a semi-comic turn as Maya returns to Washington and has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Washington to do something about it. In one extended sequence, she grabs a red marker and writes on the glass wall of her superior's office exactly how many days it has been since she located bin Laden that the Agency has done nothing about it.

Zero Dark Thirty stays far away from any personal details that might bog it down. So we learn nothing at all about Maya's past, or her personal life. This is no doubt to avoid casting any aspersions of soap opera on a "serious" film. And yet it is the fact that Skyfall, for the first time, delves into 007's past that helps put it a cut above the average Bond film; This might actually be the only movie where Bond has an actual character arc. Skyfall is really about Bond's filial relationship with M, a relationship that is threatened by the appearance of an evil foster brother-in-arms (the villain Silva, played by Javier Bardem). And there's even a hint of an origin story, as Bond goes back to the remote corner of Scotland he hails from.

Have no fear that Bond will spend much time nattering with his maiden aunts, though. These are both action movies, and both have some stupendous action sequences. In the case of Skyfall, the best may be the one in a deserted Shanghai office tower. In this scene, Bond follows his prey to an empty upper floor of a steel-and-glass skyscraper, and the two of them battle each other, silhouetted, wrapped in neon like the naked women in the opening sequence of every Bond film. 

It's interesting to note the progression of location shoots in the Bond series; once upon a time, 007 spent most of his time in Europe. In recent movies, Bond has spent some time in more exotic, if still picturesque, locales (as have his yankee stunt doubles, Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne). In addition to Shanghai, which has become synonymous with neon corporate excess in a way that Tokyo once was, back before the collapse of the Japanese economy, Bond drops in on Macau and Istanbul in this installment.

Maya pursues her quarry across the globe as well, but the locations are less picturesque: Islamabad, Gdansk, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kuwait. In general, Zero Dark Thirty's grittier locations work to the film's advantage, allowing it to be bigger than life and yet just realistic enough to be believable. Bigelow and cinematographer Greig Fraser have wisely chosen to avoid the fake-documentary feel that, at this point, is reserved for monster movies (although see my review of Chronicle for a counterexample where it works). Instead, the frame is often characterized by a desert bleakness, punctuated by bursts of occasional subcontinental color.

I often joke that although the movie Titanic takes a lot of potshots, the real sign that it's a great movie is the moment when you find yourself thinking, gosh, I really hope the ship doesn't sink. Zero Dark Thirty chalks up a similar success when the Navy SEAL team finally attacks bin Laden's complex, and you find yourself on the edge of your seat, wondering if the operation will succeed, or whether the team will actually find bin Laden before the Pakistani air force arrives. 

The entire sequence takes place at night, so the cinematographer has little to work with other than night-goggle green. But this is where the editors, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor (both Oscar-nominated), really shine. A sequence taking place entirely at night, with the characters all shrouded in identical fatigues and goggles, might easily become completely incomprehensible. Taking a mountain of footage like that and transforming it into something completely understandable, but still too suspenseful for a bathroom break, is truly a remarkable achievement.

I don't know if I've truly done either movie justice in this review; there seems to be so much more about both of them worth discussing. But one last thing that the two movies have in common is that they are both emphatically worth seeing.