The Reel Critic - 03/18/10

Even if its details are not as accurate as one might expect, “The Hurt Locker” at least holds a truth of emotion and of masochism that raises it above the overwhelming tension of its origins.

Last week, when the film snagged the Best Picture Oscar and enshrined Kathryn Bigelow as the first woman ever to win Best Director, it was just one moment in the movie’s legacy of media attention over the past few months. Since it arrived in theaters, “The Hurt Locker” has garnered critical praise, soldiers’ laments and one lawsuit. In the New York Times blog “Lens,” photojournalist Michael Kambar wrote a post about the film, titled “How Not to Depict a War.”

What critics fail to see, however, is that there is actually (and I apologize for the trite pun), a bigger picture at hand here.

“The Hurt Locker” is so viscerally wrenching that its naysayers have quite a job to do if they plan to discredit the film. Following an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in Iraq as it defuses bombs, Bigelow focuses on Staff Sgt. William James, who joins Bravo Company after the death of a much-loved and respected leader. As James’ rebellious and risk-taking persona quickly reveals itself, clashes arise. The brotherhood we are so used to seeing between soldiers is non-existent here.

In James, the actor Jeremy Renner styles a masterpiece — portraying a character whose complex humanity is embodied through his own flinch-inducing draw towards death. James has a family, and yet his insatiable itch for risk leads him toward situations that remind him of its very transience.

Deactivating bombs spells life for him, and he is good at it, too, but there is an aspect unnerving in the need for such brushes with mortality. For James, life is not quite life unless it’s on the brink of death.

Watching “The Hurt Locker” makes you loathe and love such a character, his condition immediately compelling and detracting. Yet even James does not understand James. In one poignant scene, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) tries to emphasize, to no avail, the fatality resonating in their every step.

“But you realize every time you suit up, every time we go out, it’s life or death. You roll the dice, and you deal with it. You recognize that, don’t you?” he says to James. The reply is a mere: “Yeah . . . Yea, I do. But I don’t know why.”

While this exchange does not flash across the screen in bold letters at the beginning, it exemplifies the theme of death that embodies the film more so than the one chosen. As the film starts, the following Chris Hedges quote appears:

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” Yet the film is more about death than war. It’s about the omnipresent potential lying in wait around any corner and that strange yearning to turn the corner and find it there.

“The Hurt Locker,” however, does not dwell on the real corners of Iraq. It intimates a world dominated by the characters that create it, their instincts and desires rendered blunt by the deadly extremity of their circumstances. James and his fellow soldiers lie in trenches of human emotion instead of the ones of World War II. Their battles are unseen and internal. In the end, the film’s detractors might not see their war up on the screen, but the potent force of humanity is. This power delivers the truth some find wanting in the film.