A House of Dynamite

As best I can recall, “A House of Dynamite” is the only Netflix movie I have ever seen in a movie theater first. And I was distressed to learn that even on the big screen, Kathryn Bigelow’s ticking clock nuclear thriller was coated in that same stale streaming sheen endemic to the small screen. It might have been appropriate, though, at least from my point of view, given that the doomsday movies I grew up with – “The Day After,” “Special Bulletin” – were all made for TV. Yet, even if “A House of Dynamite” can sometimes look like television, it never feels like television, infused with a couple crucial anti-plot touches in the form of an enigmatic inciting incident and ending. And while Bigelow’s screenplay co-written with Noah Oppenheim contains some clumsy dialogue, like a recurring line ripped from the godawful “Armageddon” (“This is insanity” - “No, this is reality”) and the weighty observation giving the film its title cited as being plucked from a podcast, god help us, she is not just visually mapping her narrative but creating a deliberately distressing emotional experience. 

“A House of Dynamite” begins with White House Situation Room Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tending to a sick child, and Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) at Alaska’s Fort Greely missile-defense complex taking a tense phone call, unnecessary dollops of character. The real power comes from simply watching Walker go to work, like she has a thousand times before, a breakfast order becoming a split-second window into her whole character, the necessity of staying on task and not wasting time, which becomes paramount when it becomes clear an unattributed intercontinental ballistic missile is not one more exercise but a real-world threat, headed for the United States, namely Chicago, as if my city hasn’t suffered enough in 2025. Everybody has trained for this, they are constantly reminded, but in carefully laying out the procedures born of that training, we are made to realize that even when every i is dotted and every t is crossed, the system is not necessarily infallible. 

Walker is not the only prominent character in “A House of Dynamite”; there is also Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) trying to determine the responsible aggressor, General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), senior officer at the U.S. Strategic Command, focusing on potential retaliation, and, of course, the President of the United States (Idris Elba), forced to make the ultimate call. Rather than crosscutting between them, however, Bigelow and Oppenheim choose to present “A House of Dynamite” as a triptych. Just as the missile is about to make an impact, Bigelow flashes back twice more to see the same scenario play out from other vantage points. It has a peculiar effect, cutting tension that might have been more preeminent had it presented these events simultaneously, and not really providing alternate viewpoints as a typical Rashomon effect might suggest. What it does, though, is play with and eventually subvert our Hollywood-coded expectations that there must be a solution to this apocalyptic problem. If Walker didn’t solve it, then Brady will, and if Brady doesn’t, then Potus will…but will he?

     
Bigelow keeps her locales limited, never even providing us an establishing shot of Chicago, just a dot on a map. This is akin to “Dr. Strangelove,” which stuck to just a few sets to evoke a small number of increasingly mad men holding the fate of the world in their hands, though in “A House of Dynamite,” it underscores how the people enlisted to help protect our fate might themselves be just like us: helpless. Unlike the former, the latter is not a comedy, and Bigelow’s handheld camerawork emphasizes drama and suspense, but there is emergent bleak humor too. Letts is essentially playing “Dr. Strangelove’s” Buck C. Turgidson straight, and though we are conditioned to expect POTUS to rise to the occasion, Elba’s harried air and the way he slumps in his seat in his Presidential Limo both suggest someone shrinking from it. A phone call to his wife as he labors to make a call about a counterstrike becomes a pointed evocation of how this is all up to him, which might be the movie’s single most terrifying moment if you consider, as Bigelow no doubt intends us to, it in light of the real POTUS. 

Embedded throughout “A House of Dynamite” is the struggle to determine the party responsible for firing the missile in the first place, an ambiguity that foreshadows an equally ambiguous ending. That ambiguity, however, is no cop-out but on purpose. In the great post-Cold War thriller “Crimson Tide, Denzel Washington’s Naval lieutenant commander observes that in the nuclear age, the true enemy is war itself. In the end, Bigelow doesn’t say it; she shows it.