The Hurt Locker
Even with a flashy title like Hurt Locker you won’t find a shoot ‘em up blockbuster here. Never mind the fact that a woman directed an action film; Hurt Locker stands apart from other war movies because it takes a different form than most. The rest have gripping, outrageous plots, whereas Hurt Locker is portraiture—it is a character study of the types of people who perform highly specialized jobs in the most dangerous workplace.
Hurt Locker centers on the unit of specialists who deal directly with the myriad bombs infiltrating Baghdad—they are the ones who discover, dismantle, deactivate, or if necessary, detonate the bombs in a “controlled” environment. Despite the gruesome possibilities their work entails, these men are professionals who have a unique love for their work. In the opening sequence, Sgt. Thompson (Guy Pierce) describes how the bomb they are trying to deactivate will detonate in “that beautiful mushroom pattern,” and he says it with all the heart and passion of a true bomb connoisseur. Sgt. Thompson is, sadly, blown to smithereens by this beautiful blast, even from within his blast-resistant moon suit, leaving his team members Sergeant J.T. Sanborne (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) in the hands of a newer, more reckless team leader, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). As Sgt. Sanborne and Eldridge grow accustomed to James’ unorthodox ways, the film unexpectedly elects James its protagonist, gradually revealing surprising facets of his character that seemed so volatile in the beginning.
After scaring the hell out of his teammates on their first assignment together, the unit winds up in a deadly shoot out with Iraqi insurgents somewhere outside the city. Throughout the tedious stand off that kills half their ranks, director Kathryn Bigelow creates a disarming intimacy among the soldiers through James’ unexpected nurturing. He coaches Sanborne through his shots and feeds him a juice box, then soothes a blubbering Eldridge who is cleaning his comrade’s blood off their ammunition, seemingly thriving in the situation the others can barely handle. Later, the three are sloppy drunk in their barracks, punching each other as hard as they can in a scene that hints at homoeroticism and fringes on violence. Sgt. Sanborne asks James if he has what it takes to put on “the suit,” i.e. to manually disassemble the bombs, but when compared to James, Sanborne can’t hold his liquor and can’t take James’ punches—he is simply not as crazy as James, making the case that a specialist has to be a little nuts to do the kind of work they do, and have to be more than a little crazy to actually love the work.
Bigelow leads us through the ever-changing relationships between the soldiers of Bravo Company, apparently in perfect control of the tone of the film despite the feeling of chaos and panic the setting evokes. Shot mostly in Jordan with sequences in Canada and Kuwait, Iraq doesn’t feel so different from the moon, especially when the specialists put on the suit, drawing attention to the desolation, isolation, and miles of gray dust. Bigelow is a master at distracting the audience, continually throwing us visual bones that represent viable dangers while she builds up to something unexpected. After all, delivering the unexpected really is the ultimate goal of the suspense film director.
The camerawork is mostly handheld and very bumpy, always pushing in overly close on faces and objects, never pulling back to give us the full picture, and perhaps this cinematic style is meant to be symbolic of the soldier’s position–being too close to the war and too endangered to be able to contemplate the politics of the invasion. This is where Hurt Locker reveals how pertinent its ideas really are: the war ultimately comes down to an issue of need. Sgt. James finds that even though he is a husband and a father, his family could never need him as badly as the effort in Iraq does, where he saves lives on a daily basis, and when he fails at his job the results are devastating, reminding us that whatever your stance on the politics of the Iraq war there can be no argument that the soldiers truly are needed to do this kind of work. But even though they are needed, gangs of children still huck garbage at their Humvee as they drive by which is an image that illustrates perfectly just how unappreciated their efforts are.
In light of these ideas, Hurt Locker offers a much-needed rebuttal to work like Brian DePalma’s own Iraq war movie, Redacted, which was little more than a partisan rant that recreated actual events but grossly sensationalized them, vilifying American soldiers as the perpetuators of violence who murder and rape Iraqi civilians at will, whereas in Hurt Locker, most of the violence results from hesitating to shoot civilians who were an ambiguous threat.
One thing that can be said with certainty about Hurt Locker is that it is male-oriented–it is dominated by male characters and marketed toward a male audience. (There is one female character and she has about two minutes of screen time.) The story doesn’t draw attention to a single gender issue, and there is nothing particularly feminist about the movie, which is ironically, what makes it feminist. Men direct women’s films all the time and no one questions it, but sometimes it seems like it would take a fucking miracle to get a woman in the director’s chair of a big budget movie, like, say, a Pixar feature (coming soon!), or a new superhero movie unless they are an exception, which Bigelow is. Her previous features like K-19: The Widowmaker, Strange Days (truly brutal and very disturbing), and of course, Point Break were well-received, easing producers’ fears of Bigelow’s gender, but it’s still rare to see female directors cropping up in the war zone. Hopefully with pioneers like Bigelow the ratio of male-to-female directors will become closer to one.
Hurt Locker isn’t perfect. It can be meandering at times, dipping out of focus between episodes and has characters that sometimes wander off their believable paths, but it always snaps back into focus with gripping intensity. It is a movie that will likely make you look at the war over there in a different light, and you may find that having men in the armed forces that are a bit cuckoo actually makes you sleep better. –Christianne Hedtke
Kathryn Bigelow: Director. (Point Break, Widowmaker, Strange Days)
Writer: Mark Boal