An explosive 'House of Dynamite'

 

    Terse and chilling, director Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite tackles a situation most of us would prefer not to contemplate: a nuclear attack on a major American city.

    Working from a screenplay by Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow divides her movie into three sections, each offering a different vantage point on the same brief time during which a missile hurtles toward the US.

    Few in the movie’s large ensemble of military and civilian characters are psychologically prepared for an event that probably will kill 10 million people in the initial blast. Scores of additional deaths from fallout are sure to follow. The missile's origins are unknown, but it's headed for Chicago.

     Those familiar with previous Bigelow hits such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Hurt Locker (2008) know she’s skilled at sustaining tension, and A House of Dynamite  stands as confirmation of her ability to rivet attention. In keeping with an intensely concentrated approach, Bigelow shorthands character development, opting instead to put her characters to the test.

    How quickly can they accept that they’re not dealing with a routine exercise? How good are they at handling  fear? Can they react reasonably under intense pressure?

     A strong and well-selected cast includes Rebecca Ferguson as a White House Situation Room official, Gabriel Basso as a Deputy National Security Advisor, Jared Harris as the Secretary of Defense, and Idris Elba as the President of the United States. Tracy Letts portrays a folksy general who commands personnel who scan banks of monitors. A FEMA official (Moses Ingram) tries to prepare an evacuation response.

     House of Dynamite employs too many actors to name them all. Many roles are relegated more to function than revelation. Still, Ferguson, Harris, and Elba convey the emotions accompanying concern for those outside the security perimeter, seen in glimpses that remind us that most people are unaware of a pending Armageddon.

      Snippets of story detonate along the way. A Major General at a remote outpost (Anthony Ramos) falls into despair when his crew fails to intercept the missile. The Secretary of Defense grapples with the fact that his daughter lives in Chicago, the targeted city. An expert on North Korea (Greta Lee) watches a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg with her son when she's called for advice.  

       This contrast between two kinds of horrible warfare may be a bit on the nose for a movie that avoids extraneous observation, but A House of Dynamite mostly meets its subject head-on.

      Given current preoccupations — wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, National Guard troops in major cities, and a government shutdown — A House of Dynamite may seem a little out of sync with today's worries.

    Perhaps that’s the point. Bigelow’s movie serves as a sobering tap on the shoulder from someone intent on reminding us that other dangers lurk. Heaven forbid that one day a missile makes a mockery of the quotidian unfolding of what, for most of us, will begin as just another day. 

 

When the police become torturers

Detroit immerses us in a brutal racist incident that took place during the city's 1967 riot.

I found it impossible to watch Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit and not be flooded by a complex torrent of reactions to the movie's undeniable visceral power. Bigelow takes an unflinching look at a little known racist incident that took place during the Detroit riots of 1967. Police brutality and racism are awful, of course, but how much of it do we need to see before that point effectively has been made?

That's a question that every moviegoer will have to answer for his or herself, but -- I wondered, if in trying for unblinking honesty, Bigelow hadn't sometimes mistake intensity for insight.

Bigelow divides her movie into three unequal parts. She begins with an appropriately frenzied approach to the Detroit riots, settles into a disturbing and violent example of racist brutality, and then -- as if to temper the horror of what we've been watching -- spins out a courtroom finale in which the offending police officers are brought to trial.

Bigelow bases her movie on a true story, chronicled in a 1968 book by John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident. Events at the Algiers were a kind of adjunct to the Detroit riots that began when the police raided an after-hours bar frequented by black patrons.

No matter what side of the political divide on which you fall, it's nearly impossible to watch Detroit without making references to the climate between black communities and police forces that have been infected by institutional racism -- not only in 1967, but in 2017.

At the Algiers Motel, several young black men, two white women, several police officers and a black security guard are thrown together during the heat of the riot. The police officers -- led by a racist cop (Will Poulter) -- terrorize their captives in ways that result in psychological trauma and, ultimately, killing. By the end of the night, three young black men are dead.

From the outset, we've tagged Poulter's Krauss as an undisguised racist. Even before the incident at the Algiers, he goes unpunished for shooting an unarmed black man in the back.

The movie's segments in the Algiers Motel are on a par with the kind of sustained cruelty we sometimes see in horror films. Of course, torture is precisely what the police are doing to their innocent victims, perpetrating an invisible slice of horror during the intensely pressurized atmosphere of a violent outburst that made Detroit resemble a war zone.

During this portion of the film, the police line their victims against the wall, singling them out for humiliation, along with two white women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who were partying at the Algiers. The cops accuse the women of being prostitutes, an opinion they seem to justify only because the women have been hanging around black men.

Three figures stand out among the black men, the lead singer of a group called The Dramatics (Algee Smith), a military veteran recently returned from Vietnam (Anthony Mackie) and a friend of Smith's character (Nathan Davis Jr.).

No one is more conflicted about what's happening at the Algiers than John Boyega's Dismukes, a security guard sent by his employer to protect a store from looting. Dismukes becomes caught up in the Algiers' drama. He's a law-and-order guy, but he's not blind to the racism that's being displayed by out-of-control cops.

All of this begins because the cops believe that someone in the motel fired a gun at them. As it turns out, the gun was a starter pistol fired by a young man (Jason Mitchell) who had been trying to frighten a small gathering at the Algiers by mimicking the way white policemen treat blacks. To make his act more convincing, Mitchell's character draws the fake gun, eventually firing it out a window.

I don't want to leave the impression that Detroit proceeds entirely without nuance. In the movie's later going, we meet cops who are appalled by what happened at the Algiers. We sometimes see the movie's brutal but self-serving cops trying to find a way out of the situation they've created. Not every black character is willing to stand up for truth when it comes to exposing the viciousness to which they've been subjected.

Bigelow may want us to understand that the cops have deluded themselves into believing that abuse is not only justifiable but a privilege of their positions of authority. Once the firebombs start flying, these policemen seem to think they've been granted license to do anything.

All of this unfolds after a prologue featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence that try to provide some context for the riots: northward migration by blacks devolved into segregated housing projects and high unemployment. That's the gist.

Later, we'll see news clips of George W. Romney and President Lyndon Johnson, political leaders who remind us that what we're witnessing springs from a reality; the government apparatus geared up to meet what it saw as the challenge of unleashed fury and wanton destruction.

Written by Mark Boal, who also wrote Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit might have been even more daring had it taken some time to show us the pre-riot atmosphere in the Detroit police department, the conditions that presumably made Poulter's character possible.

As the movie unfolded, I found myself wondering how a director as meticulous as Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City) would have handled such a volatile story.

It's also worth remembering that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing already made a statement about the ways in which racial violence can be kindled.

So a confession: At various points during events at the Algiers Motel, I wondered what Bigelow was trying to accomplish by allowing them to drag on so long.

Other points are more economically made. Mackie portrays a Marine who recently returned from Vietnam. Having served his country offers him no protection from the wrath of the police.
That's a powerful observation.

It also helps to remember that many of the current and well-publicized incidents of questionable police conduct did not take place under violent duress; racism hardly needs riots as an excuse to express itself. Sometimes, all it takes is a traffic stop.

'Zero Dark Thirty,' one the year's best

Director Kathryn Bigelow takes us into a shadow world as the CIA hunts for Bin Laden.

The trouble with reviewing a movie that's already opened in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- particularly one that has generated a fair amount of controversy -- is that informed viewers already may have burned out on all the surrounding arguments. In the case of Kathryn Bigelow's riveting Zero Dark Thirty, heated discussion has centered on early picture scenes in which a prisoner is tortured in hopes that he will reveal information leading to the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

A trifecta of senators -- Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- have accused the film of being "grossly inaccurate." Others have chimed in, saying the movie wrongly suggests that waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation led to information vital to locating Bin Laden.

I leave it to you to decide whether the film makes an argument for the efficacy of torture. I didn't think so. The captive who's being humiliated, waterboarded and shoved in a box only begins to spill the beans when he's treated well, fed decently and not humiliated. Is this a case of good cop trumping bad cop? I don't really know. Maybe the movie doesn't, either.

If I were going to quibble with Zero Dark Thirty, which I found seriously compelling and generally provocative, I'd say that it's most vulnerable for not taking a moral stance about many of the events that it depicts.

When I first saw the movie, the absence of such a clearly defined position bothered me; I kept wondering what Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal thought about the events they were depicting in the complex narrative they've assembled with skill and finesse.

But the more I thought about it, the more I began to feel grateful that Bigelow presents the material in ways that allow us to reach our own conclusions. I certainly didn't leave the theater thinking it was commendable that the U.S. tortured people -- and, yes, waterboarding certainly looks like torture.

Remember, though, the CIA's use of waterboarding was endorsed by some pretty high level politicians in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Maybe you even felt that extreme measures were justifiable if they helped to prevent another attack.

For my part, I viewed Zero Dark Thirty mostly as a backstage drama to history. Bigelow won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker (2008), a film about a small squad that disarmed explosive devises in Iraq. Like that movie, Zero Dark Thirty presents us with a slice of reality that remains remote for most of us. It reminds us that in our consumer-oriented, mall-driven lives, few of us pay attention to the brutal realities that preoccupy some Americans, in this case numerous CIA operatives.

The movie's credit, it doesn't lionize its main character. Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a CIA agent whose persistence -- often in the face of stiff opposition -- leads to the killing of Bin Laden. Chastain's Maya, a CIA newbie, enters the movie when she's thrust into an interrogation that's not easy to watch. The session is being led by a seasoned CIA agent (Jason Clarke), a man who seems to believe that a certain amount of "dirty" work comes along with the job, but that not everyone can (or should) try to do it.

Loose limbed and comfortably informal, Clarke's Dan maintains that no prisoner will talk until he accepts the fact that his position is entirely hopeless.

Chastain has the good sense not to turn Maya into a conventional heroine. She's often at odds with others; she's insistent when she believes she's got the goods; and she seems to have no life beyond her CIA duties.

Instead of dwelling on Maya as a character, Bigelow makes her a lynchpin in a story that hopscotches the world, prying open the lid that normally keeps CIA activities under wraps.

Throughout, Chastain receives able support from a large cast. Stand-outs include Kyle Chandler, as the head of CIA operations in Islamabad; Jennifer Ehle, as a CIA veteran who, unlike Maya, has a family and a less obsessive view of her work; and James Gandolfini, as the head of the CIA.

Boal's narrative compresses the 10 years that preceded a SEAL team's foray into Pakistan, where Bin Laden was killed. Such concision is bound to result in omissions and maybe even some misrepresentations. But both Boal and Bigelow say that the movie has been thoroughly researched. And even if Zero Dark Thirty isn't 100 percent accurate, it serves as an intriguing catalog of the complex and often-troubling responses that have developed in a post 9/11 world.

To provide context, Bigelow begins with a dark screen. We hear snippets of real phone conversations from people trapped in the World Trade Center. We don't need to see the twin towers fall to be reminded that the grief and panic that followed 9/11 helped create the atmosphere in which the rest of the movie unfolds.

Don't get me wrong. Zero Dark Thirty is no faux documentary or even a ''docudrama." It's a dramatic recreation of events that provides an involving and detailed look at how the CIA worked to find Bin Laden.

It spoils nothing to tell you that Bigelow doesn't trump up the killing for extra kick, although the raid on Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound is plenty tense. After 10 years of sleuthing, interrogating, bribery, conniving, obsession, stretched ethics and internal CIA bickering, we wind up with one guy in a body bag. It's not exactly a triumphant moment, in part because just about everybody looks smaller when they're dead.

So, you decide whether it was all worth it. You decide how you feel about this shadow world of espionage, namely what you think of some of the means employed to achieve the goal of finding Bin Laden. As I've said, Zero Dark Thirty won't tell you how to feel, but it will, I think, demand that you ask some difficult questions.

Handicapping Oscar: My predictions

I look for Hurt Locker to blow up big on Oscar night.

Jeff Bridges should have no trouble taking home Oscar gold.

It pays to be bossy, if you're Sandra Bullock.

It's time for the fun game the whole family can play. We're talking about that international pastime and water cooler preoccupation known as Predict the Oscars. I try not to make too big a deal out of this annual exercise because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences already makes a big enough deal out of the way it pats itself the back.

Besides, like just about everything else, Oscar has suffered from a bit of deflation. No matter how much the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tries to hype Oscar, the program never will regain all of its luster. Why? For one thing, Oscar once provided a rare opportunity to observe movie stars in unscripted moments. In era of TMZ and a zillion other compulsive chroniclers of celebrity behavior, that possibility now seems old hat. The entertainment press has dragged the gods down off Olympus and, in many cases, the gods have been more than happy to participate in their fall – all in search of attention in an entertainment marketplace that's more crowded than a 19th century tenement.

To make matters worse, Oscar follows on the heels of a growing parade of previously televised award shows. It's still the big enchilada – the gold standard of awards – but by now its nominees have been seen on as many podiums as some hack Congressman up for re-election. I wish Oscar had shown its face prior to the Winter Olympics, not after. If the Academy had waited much longer, it could have given out the Oscars along with a generous helping of Easter eggs.

Award weariness aside, it falls to critics to predict the outcome of a race that has limited capacity to take our breath away – unless an obvious shocker jolts the proceedings, say, District 9 beating both The Hurt Locker and Avatar for best picture.

So here are my predictions in the major categories in a year in which I believe Oscar will spread its largess among a variety of pictures, most of them deserving. Tune in Sunday to see whether I'm in tune with Oscar or hopelessly out of touch.

BEST PICTURE
What will win: Hurt Locker
What should win: Hurt Locker
Upset possibility: The Blind Side

Commentary: A Blind Side victory could emerge as a result of vote splitting among Up in the Air, The Hurt Locker and Avatar, but I'm thinking that director Kathryn Bigelow's white-knuckle look at an Iraq bomb squad will impress voters because it brought audiences close to fighting men in a war that generally has remained distant to the public. Also, it happens to be the best of the 10 nominated pictures. Avatar wins if the Academy decides that popularity, impressive 3D and a major “wow” factor trump everything else, a distinct possibility, but I'm still predicting victory for Hurt Locker.

BEST DIRECTOR
Who will win: Kathryn Bigelow
Who should win Kathryn Bigelow
Upset possibility: James Cameron for presiding over the complicated technological process that brought Avatar to the screen for a piddling $500 million.

Commentary: The best thing about Oscar (aside from whatever fashion disasters loom) will be the Academy's recognition for Bigelow, a director who happens to be a woman, but who never underestimates the visceral kick that movies provide. She'd be the first woman to win best director. Oh well, it's only taken 81 previous tries for Oscar to get around to recognizing that there are two sexes, and both can operate behind the camera.

I'm betting that Cameron will not prevail because Bigelow already won the prestigious Directors Guild of America award as the year's best director. If you take a second look (or a first if you haven't seen it) at The Hurt Locker, you'll discover that it's gripping, vivid and bolstered by superior performances from the trio of actors who played members of the movie's three-man bomb squad.

BEST ACTOR
Who will win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Who should win: Jeff Bridges
Upset possibility: The biggest possible upset would be Jeremy Renner, who played an adrenalin-junkie GI who disarmed bombs in The Hurt Locker.

Commentary: OK, Crazy Heart was a little overrated, but it presents an opportunity to recognize an actor for current efforts and for an impressive body of past work. Conventional wisdom has it that Bridges' talents have been somewhat overlooked by Hollywood. I'm not sure I buy that, but I have no problem with him taking home a statue that I originally thought would go to George Clooney for playing a downsizing specialist in Up in the Air.

The moral of this story: It never hurts to play a drunk, especially one who sings country/western.

BEST ACTRESS
Who will win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Who should win: Carey Mulligan, An Education
If there's an upset: Meryl Streep.

Commentary: Bullock did a fine job in The Blind Side. Her portrayal of the single-minded Leigh Anne Tuohy captured audience hearts and allowed Bullock to dominate a movie about a woman who helped a young black man find his way into a successful football career. Still, the most subtle and revealing performance was given by Mulligan in An Education. She played a bright teen-ager who was seduced by an older man and managed to make it part of a 1960s rebellion against societal limitations on women.
It's a little weird to put Streep into the upset category, but Bullock seemed to have all the momentum going into the Oscar voting, and although Streep's portrayal of Julia Child -- the great popularizer of French cuisine -- in Julie & Julia was strong, she's already recognized as one of our best actresses. If the voters are feeling particularly frisky, they may just want to honor Gabourey Sidibe for playing the title role in Precious. I'm thinking that won't happen.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Who will win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Who should win: Christoph Waltz
If there's an upset. Christopher Plummer.

Commentary: Waltz's performance as Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was chilling for its cunning, calmness and eerie politeness. Waltz created one of the scariest screen Nazis ever. The only way he loses is if voters decide that Plummer's wonderfully generous portrayal of Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station and the actor's age – he's 80 – merit recognition. It could happen because like us, the voters have seen all the other awards shows and may just want to assert their independence.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Who will win: Mo'Nique, Precious
Who should win: Mo'Nique
Upset possibility: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart.

Commentary. It's possible that Mo'Nique, a comic by trade, is a one-trick pony when it comes to drama, but the self-justifying speech her character made in Precious was as riveting as anything I saw all year. Mo'Nique tapped into something scary, vulnerable and selfish; she made us understand the monster she was playing without condoning her cruelty.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Who will win: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Who should win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
If there's an upset: There won't be one.

Commentary: I'm not one of the great fans of Inglourious Basterds, but I'll say this:. Tarantino writes some of the best scenes you'll find in contemporary movies. The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds couldn't have been better, and the movie had other scenes that were almost as good. I don't think Tarantino's brilliant scenes always add up to great movies, but if he wins, I'll be happy for him.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Who will win: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air
Who should win: The guys who wrote In the Loop
If there's an upset: Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire.

Commentary: I'm a big fan of In the Loop, a scorching satire about the way United States and Britain become involved in a war in the Persian Gulf. But Up in the Air, an adaptation of a Walter Kirn novel, is equally deserving. Reitman served up a mainstream entertainment that has something meaningful to say about the current economic chaos; Up in the Air secured Reitman's place as a director who knows how to entertain with wit and careful observation. I also admire the fact that Reitman refuses to waste his time (or ours) on fluff.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
What will win. Up
What should win: Fantastic Mr. Fox
If there's an upset: The Secret of the Kells.

Commentary: If The Secret of the Kells, which hasn't had much play in the United States yet, were to win, it would mark of the one greatest upsets in Oscar history. I thought Up, which began brilliantly, was a bit overrated, but that puts me in a distinct minority. I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson's extremely amusing adaptation of a Roald Dahl story; it was funny and boasted the best voice work of the year.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
What will win: The Cove
What should win: Don't have a rooting interest this year. If there's an upset: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Commentary: I see the possibility of an upset as extremely unlikely. The Cove was technically impressive and advocated for a good cause, halting the slaughter of dolphins in Japan.

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
What will win: The White Ribbon
What should win: A Prophet
If there's an upset look for the Israeli film Ajami to emerge victorious.

Commentary: Michael Haneke's White Ribbon, a look at life in a German village prior to World War I, was slow-moving, creepy and well-acted. It also had the distinctive flavor of an art movie, thanks in part to its stark, black-and-white imagery. The Prophet, about the torments and brutalities faced by an Arab prisoner in a French prison, has more visceral power and made a stronger impression on me. It's a powerhouse of a movie.

So have at it, folks. Your guesses will be as good as mine. And, to tell you the truth, I hope a lot of my predictions are wrong. That will mean that Oscar night proved far more exciting than expected. Meanwhile, I encourage you to delve deeply into categories that I've bypassed. It's time for your predictions, complaints and anything else that's on your minds. Good luck, especially if you're in a pool. These days, every nickel counts.