Now that it has picked up six Oscars, everyone has heard about The Hurt Locker, but all through 2009 it proved something of a sleeper, garnering critical acclaim but not much else. It is being touted as the lowest-grossing best picture winner ever, and its Taiwan release has been on hold since the middle of last year, likely because of concerns that this understated Iraq war movie was not going to cut it with local audiences.
Unlike many higher-profile though short-lived films that picked up on the potential of the Iraq war as movie material, The Hurt Locker does not feature any action star hot shots, and its story about a bomb disposal team working in Baghdad does not provide opportunities for much in the way of special effects. Even with its Oscar haul, it is likely to come out the loser against The Green Zone, with Matt Demon and the cachet of the Bourne movies behind it, which also opens today.
That would be sad, for The Hurt Locker is one of those unsettled and ambiguous films that improves with age and re-watching, and may well prove to be the classic war movie for the first part of the 21st century. The story is that of Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who joins a bomb disposal unit after the death of their bomb technician, Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), a capable and popular team leader.
James is not much of a team player, but exists in his own personal limbo, craving the excitement of coming face-to-face with unexploded ordinance and trying to understand the minds that set up these deadly devices. He is content to leave the politics of engagement to others. This alone makes The Hurt Locker stand out from other Iraq war features.
James’ relationship with Sergeant JT Sandborn, a cautious though capable soldier keen to play it by the book, and Specialist Owen Eldridge, who is gradually becoming unstuck as fear and confusion build within him, is at the heart of the movie — though it is a relationship that can be interpreted as representing the fragmented psychology behind the US engagement in this conflict.
James has a very narrow certainty about what he is about, but when his blinkered view is forced open, however momentarily, he is seen to be just as confused as the others.
James’ wife makes a brief appearance, but essentially this is a guy film, and women and children are ideas that exist in a separate world that will not become a reality until the end of a rotation in Iraq. The fact that director Kathryn Bigelow has got beneath the tough carapace of these soldiers without getting sentimental is one of the film’s many strengths.
The other is the space that Bigelow allows for interpretation. James’ cavalier attitude toward his team puts lives at risk, but at the same time cuts through military BS and senseless precautions, as when he strips off his protective suit when working to disarm a car bomb that would obliterate everything for hundreds of meters if it
went off. He would rather die comfortable, he says.
James takes a shine to an insolent Iraqi kid selling pirated DVDs. When the kid emerges alive after James believes him dead at the hands of bombmakers, he feels betrayed rather than relieved. His mourning has been misplaced, and that is the fault of the Iraqis. You can see him battening down the hatches after this brief experience of engagement. Real flesh-and-blood people are much more complex than abstractions, and James quickly returns to playing a lethal but impersonal game with the bombmakers he is pitted against.
Ralph Fiennes and David Morse make delightful cameos that lampoon the madness and meanness of the Iraq conflict, Fiennes as a bounty hunter capturing and killing high-value targets and Morse as a colonel who clearly sees the war as something of a mix between a great ball game and divine retribution.
It is the attitudes of the men faced with the challenge of surviving, rather than the ebb and flow of the conflict or any wider moral issues of whether the West should be involved in the conflict at all, that dominate the film. In this sense, it is a surprisingly intimate film, despite its big war zone setting.
Bigelow is no stranger to big movies about men, having directed K-19: The Widowmaker in 2002, but it is the psychology of the characters, rather than the window dressing of military style that interests her. Going head-to-head with ex-husband James Cameron, with his big-budget, big-spectacle picture Avatar at the Oscars, it is natural to cheer the success of the less ostentatious production. The Hurt Locker has the advantage of being a thoughtful film that still has its share of suspense, and deploys old-fashioned storytelling that ties up the narrative neatly without providing any easy answers.
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