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.

Kathryn Bigelow Makes 5 Movies You Didn't Know Could Emotionally Destroy You

I had not seen Neko Case live since 2009 and, believe it or not, I had somehow forgotten how good she is live – the supreme overpoweringness of her voice. Sweet Mary mother of God, that voice. It batters you like a hurricane, but you don’t flee. You can’t flee. You can only stand there and smile and appreciate it and let it wrap you in its intense embrace. And made me think about what Neko Case could do with other songs. I’m not talking about classic songs, like “Farewell Angelina”, which if she sang…..like, damn. No, I’m talking about songs that shouldn’t necessarily pulverize you. Think, for example, about Neko Case re-imagining “Margaritaville.” Think about her singing the line “Wasting away again in Margaritaville” and think about how emphatically she'd belt “Wasting.” Hearing her cover it, you wouldn't think of Parrotheads - you'd think of a dispirited man slumped at a tropical bar during the storm season with a warm Corona and a serious alimony check he just wrote that's about to bounce. That long lost shaker of salt would be a metaphor for life, man. It'd be the cover album to end all cover albums - Neko Case: Songs That You Didn’t Know Could Emotionally Destroy You.

Then, the other night, when I stumbled upon Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 opus “Point Break” showing on the Sundance Channel (wait, what?), I flashed back to Neko Case singing songs you never thought could emotionally destroy you. Because really, I never thought that a film about surfing bank robbers starring Keanu Reeves could emotionally destroy me, but when Patrick Swayze is standing on the beach before the herculean waves of the mystical 50 Year Storm - “it's not tragic do die doing what you love” - it never fails to emotionally destroy me. But that's what Kathryn Bigelow, auteur extraordinaire, did do and can do. And it got me to thinking.

It got me to thinking about other movies Kathryn Bigelow could have made. It got me to thinking specifically about movies that you never would have thought could have emotionally destroyed you but that in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow could have left you welling up and reaching for the Kleenex and rising from your seat and applauding with simultaneous cries of delirious "Bravo!".

Kathryn Bigelow Makes 5 Movies You Didn't Know Could Emotionally Destroy You

Terminal Velocity. It's not so much the premise - though, rest assured, Bigelow could make a premise of a KGB agent and skydiver battling the Russian mafia over gold sing - and it's definitely not anything to do with Charlie Sheen. No, it's the presence of one Natassja Kinski, because I often like to imagine an alternate reality where Bigelow/Kinski is like Cameron/Schwarzenegger. Oh, 'tis a beautiful dream.

30 Days of Night. Kathryn's already kicked ass on one vampire film so why not take a crack at another with an immaculate foundation - a remote Alaskan town undergoing a monthlong Polar Night resultilng an obligatory vampire outbreak - that went so wasted. She could jettison Josh Hartnett, bump Melissa George up to the primary role and let the arctic atmospherics ooooooooooooooze.

Quicksilver. Because I'm pretty sure we need Bigelow to make a bike messenger movie. Her “Quicksilver” would be to “Premium Rush” as “Casablanca” is to “Havana”.

Money Train. This, I feel like, almost isn't even playing fair. This is like LeBron James in a layup line. Give Ms. Bigelow a film starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as foster brothers, a subway train piled high with stacks of cash, Jennifer Lopez as a character named Grace Santiago, and she'd do the rest. They'd be pulling two dudes out of the audience on a nightly basis around the world to play Wesley and Woody in the stage version. This thing'd have a Criterion edition.

Raise the Titanic. The tag: They said that God himself couldn't sink it. Now they say that no man could raise it. And he can't. Because only she can. Jessica Chastain stars in.....“Raise The Titanic”.

Blue Steel/Strange Days

If you felt like being snarky you might say the best thing to happen to Kathryn Bigelow was getting divorced from James Cameron (rim shot!). I would say the best thing to happen to Kathryn Bigelow was Mark Boal.

If there is a recurring theme in Bigelow's early films it is the age-old notion of style over substance. Granted, "Point Break" (1991), for all its incessant lunacy, is so stylish, the lack of substance is generally negated. Her 1987 vampire thriller "Near Dark", believe it or not, is even better than "Point Break", less lunatic and more stylish. In the last couple weeks, however, I have given Bigelow's "Strange Days" (1995) and "Blue Steel" (1989) maiden viewings and in each case the style simply could win out over the substance problem.

It becomes more glaring because quite clearly Bigelow wanted these films to have substance, to be about something, to say something. "Strange Days", culled from a screenplay by the aforementioned Cameron and Jay Cocks, is an intriguing idea, set in the last 48 hours of 1999 and its primary plot concerns characters literally re-living other people's memories via a helpful cinematic sci-fi device called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device). Our protagonist, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a disgraced ex-L.A. cop, now peddles them on the black market while simultaneously being addicted to SQUIDs involving the former light of his life Faith (Juliette Lewis).

Imagining the ultimate voyeur experience is a marvelous concept and one of the film's finest moments involves Lenny re-experiencing a sexual experience with Faith as Bob Marley's eternally hopeful "Three Little Birds" jaunts along on the soundtrack, blissfully unaware how its positivity fails in the face of Lenny's narcissistic longing.

But the film - overlong by a good 20 minutes - devolves into a routine "whodunit?" involving the requisite psychopath who is going around murdering innocents and releasing the murders on snuff SQUIDs. The idea can only mask this genre obviousness for so long and Bigelow's style, while dreamily forceful (a sequence having nothing to do with anything in which Faith fronts her punk band on a P.J. Harvey cover is pure ecstasy), is rendered mute as the story lumbers to a less than thought-provoking conclusion.

"Blue Steel", meanwhile, is even more laborious. Opening like "Strange Days" with Bigelow's trademark POV shot and a dramatic scene that turns out to not be quite as real as you think it is, the film then eases into its opening credits which involve nothing beyond cooly (bluely) ogling a Smith & Wesson.

Jamie Lee Curtis, rocking the 80's mullet as only Jamie Lee Curtis could, is a Megan Turner, a brand new member of the NYPD who within her first 24 hours on the job has blasted a robber to kingdom come. The robber drops his gun. The gun lands next to a cowering stockbroker named Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver). Slyly, quietly, he takes the gun for himself.

When we see Eugene in the seconds before this supermarket stick-up he is perusing his grocery list - an actual written-out grocery list. This clues us into the type of person he must be, but once he has possession of the gun he goes off the rails and admires himself in the mirror of the office bathroom before gleefully murdering a stranger for no reason whatsoever in a driving rainstorm. Yikes. "Blue Steel" appears to be setting itself up as a commentary on America's gun culture and the way a shiny weapon can so easily turn a person on.

Alas, 'tis not to be. Despite the written-out grocery list, Eugene quickly outs himself as a murderous sociopath who decides to toy with this Megan Turner and in no time at all "Blue Steel" has devolved into a hoary genre exercise. By the end, Eugene has transitioned into a traditional movie monster who CANNOT be killed. I honestly thought Megan was going to have to bait Eugene into a hydraulic press à la "The Terminator" to finish the job.

Two movies, two humongous helpings of style, two appealing ideas, all lost in a failure to appropriately explore them and instead lean on fossilized story tropes.

Enter: Mark Boal. Two strong, clear-headed scripts ("The Hurt Locker" and, even better, this past year's "Zero Dark Thirty"), Bigelow behind the camera and voila! A Best Picture win, a Best Director win and another Best Picture nod. Here's to hoping Bigelow & Boal never break up.

Zero Dark Thirty

“What else have you worked on besides bin Laden?”

“Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.” 

The first time we truly get a good look at Maya (Jessica Chastain) is in an interrogation room where an al-Queda operative named Anmar (Reda Kateb) is strung up and sadistically water boarded by burly C.I.A. officer Dan (Jason Clarke). But many of these shots are struck in a wide frame so that we can see Maya to the left, standing on the sides of her feet, arms crossed in such a way to suggest she is trying to huddle with herself, generally evoking someone out of her element, fearful and leery of the tactics on display. When we return to the same room and same prisoner later there is a brief moment when Maya is left alone with the prisoner. He senses, as we sense, her wariness. He pleads for help. She replies: “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Woah. She is not quite who we thought she was.

"Zero Dark Thirty", a joint effort by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter (war corespondent) Mark Boal, is a re-telling of America’s attempt in the wake of September 11th to find and kill the man responsible, al-Queda king Osama bin Laden. It stretches across years, chock full of names and dates and places, stops, starts and dead ends. The real deed took, as acting director of the C.I.A. Michael Morell has noted, “the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers.” Bigelow and Boal, however, choose, correctly, to make Maya our one surrogate, our entry point, a character that does not necessarily come manufactured as imposingly heroic and slogan-barking but frightened, suspicious and, ultimately obsessive. 

The much-debated torture scenes in the film are explicit and treading murky, inflammatory ground. It is not outright propaganda but nor does it deny, and in one sequence we watch characters watching President Obama on "60 Minutes" claiming torture was not used in locating bin Laden. The most significant bit here is the characters’ reaction – that is, they have none, as if it is business as usual, as if the President is merely reciting the company line. That is a fairly strong statement. And if this is a political film, and that can certainly be argued, well, this is the film drawing a line in the sand and taking a side, and what are politics if they are not drawing lines in the sand and taking sides?

Does it argue that torture was instrumental in the capture and killing? It does, yes, in that the most crucial clue is revealed by Anmar. And though he reveals it in a moment of water boarding reprieve, of being afforded food and water, it is quite clear that torture laid the groundwork for this revelation. At the same time, the clue is specifically called “a needle in a haystack”, underscoring the notion that clues – strong or weak – were gathered from an assortment of places and that wherever they came from, however they were obtained, it was going to take a person or people to latch onto one and have the faith (compulsion) to see it through.

The clue is a name. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. A false name, as it turns out, but a false name that could lead to a real name. He becomes, in a sense, the Sean Regan of "Zero Dark Thirty", the (mostly) unseen focus of attention, the piece of intel to which Maya clings with fervor, the name she will track to the ends of the earth, convinced to her core that whoever he is will unlock the gate, figurative or otherwise, to bin Laden’s hiding place.

When a few of her colleagues are killed in the tragic attack at Camp Chapman in 2009 she tells another character: “I’ve lost a lot of my friends. I believe I was spared to finish the job.” We know bin Laden will be found and killed, of course, and he is in an elongated sequence that in spite of our awareness of its conclusion will still you breathless. Yet, in a strange way, if the film has a storytelling flaw it is that for this chunk of running time, Maya, to whom and to whose quest we have become so attached, is effectively sidelined. 

More telling is the build-up to the “jackpot”, the way in which the infamous walled-off compound at Abbottabad is discovered and how colleagues, be it C.I.A. or Presidential advisers, waffle in their desire to move on the location without definitive knowledge that the desired target is inside. Maya is definite. She knows. SHE.KNOWS. Everyone goes around an obligatory conference table reciting in percentages their confidence level. They are moderate to less than confident. Then Maya declares: ”One hundred percent.” She quickly amends it to “ninety-five percent. Because I know how people feel about certainty in here.”

Throughout the film we never see Maya off location. She is always at the job, tucked away at some computer with some stack of files, questioning some detainee. She counts off the days since the compound’s discovery with no action by scribbling the number with a magic marker on her boss’s office window. So often “possessed” characters in movies are given requisite home front scenes in which they are glimpsed ignoring spouses and forgetting children’s birthdays. Maya does not even have THAT. A female colleague wonders if she has at least hooked up with another guy on base. Ha! Maya taking time away from the job to hook up? Please! 

Bin Laden and his operatives, for all the atrocious harm they committed across the globe, had an unshakable, if misguided, belief in what they were doing. They were zealots. So is Maya. It takes one to catch one. And in the last stunning shot a single tear is shed. You could read this as relief. Re-consider it, and then consider what Maya is going to do whenever she gets where she is going. “Nothing. I’ve worked on nothing else.”

Often great movies do not reveal themselves in full until the final second and that is "Zero Dark Thirty’s" intention all along – it belongs to Jessica Chastain, and in that instant she cracks the entire movie wide open.