The Hurt Locker: A Near-Perfect War Film

The U.S. Army bomb disposal unit has three men: an intelligence officer, the specialist who covers the scene with his rifle and the staff sergeant who walks up to the device and tries to turn it off. Today there’s a report of one on a Baghdad street. Mission simple to define — “Let them know that if they’re gonna leave a bomb on the side of the road,” the staff sergeant says, “we’re gonna blow up their f—in’ road” — but way harder to accomplish. As he walks toward the contaminated area wearing a heavily insulated space suit on a 130-degree day, he catches the corner-eyesight of a man about to use a cell phone. The spaceman turns and runs. Too late: BOOM! The bomb detonates and so does he. Blood seeps down his helmet visor like red rain on the wrong side of a car windshield.

This is the first scene of The Hurt Locker, which has its world premiere here at the Venice Film Festival before playing Sunday at the Toronto fest. No U.S. opening or distributor has been secured, but that should change once festival people strap themselves in for this dynamite drive through the Iraq occupation. (Make that war.) Except for a few digressive scenes — a solo sortie of personal vengeance, a conversation about what it all means — that could easily be cut from the 2 hr. 11 min. running time, The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes.

The director, Kathryn Bigelow, has paraded her adroitness with complex stories about oddball characters in two curious subgenres: Near Dark (1987) was the all-time teenage vampire love story, Point Break (1991) the all-time surfer-heist movie. The scriptwriter, Marc Boal, is a journalist for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Playboy, which ran a story that Paul Haggis expanded into the sharpest of last year’s Iraq-related dramas, In the Valley of Elah. These two filmmakers have pooled their complementary talents to make one of the rare war movies that’s strong but not shrill, and sympathetic to guys doing an impossible job.

With the death of their boss, and 38 days left in their rotation, the two survivors — Sgt. J.T. “Bomber Mike” Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) get a new guy, Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who lacks the dead man’s leadership skills or his bluff camaraderie. James doesn’t say much, just does his own thing, which is to keep little pieces of Baghdad from blowing up.

On his first mission, James releases a cloud of smoke, protecting him from sharpshooters but obliterating his comrades’ view of him. (There’s another company ready to cover him closer to the action.) A taxi has just edged toward the suspected device; he tells the driver to back out of the area. No movement. James walks closer, repeats the order; stillness. He puts his gun against the man’s head: “Wanna back up?” The car slides into reverse. “Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent,” somebody says, “he sure is now.” Finding a string nearly buried in the street dirt, James finds it attached to seven bombs and matter-of-factly snaps the wire for each. OK, that’s done. Piece of cake, seven slices.

It’s a creepy marvel to watch James in action. He has the cool aplomb, analytical acumen and attention to detail of a great athlete, or a master psychopath, maybe both. A quote from former New York Times Iraq expert Christopher Hedges that opens the film says, “War is a drug.” Movies often editorialize on this theme: the man who’s a misfit back home but an efficient, imaginative killing machine on the battlefield. Bigelow and Boal aren’t after that. They’re saying that, in a hellish peace-keeping operation like the U.S. deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan (James’ previous assignment), the Army needs guys like James.

Some people have the luck or curse to do what they’re supremely good at; and the exercise of that skill gives pleasure, even if the job carries the imminent risk of death. The talent that another man might have for making bombs, James has for finding and silencing them. It’s not just his job, it’s his vocation. Whether he’s stripping a car piece by piece or cutting open a boy’s stomach to pull out an IED, James has the instincts, let’s say the genius, to do it. “Mission accomplished” is not a Presidential PR phrase, it’s a definition of this man at work. It’d be a crime not to apply his expertise to saving lives. James is also in it for the fun. We learn that he has a wife and a baby back home, but Baghdad is where he feels most alive — performing a task that could end his life. If defusing bombs isn’t a drug for James, it’s a stimulant, pure caffeine, his headiest, most essential adrenaline.

A genius makes his own rules; a soldier isn’t supposed to. Before examining the suspect car, James doffs his space suit; at this close range it won’t offer much protection. (“If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna be comfortable.”) More recklessly, he tosses his headset on the ground, so he doesn’t have to hear Sanborn’s pleas to get the hell out of there. Groups of men have gathered at storefronts, on the balconies and roofs of apartment houses, and James’ lone-gunman bravado could jeopardize the mission. But a genius has to stay focused. There’s got to be a bomb in here somewhere; ah, under the hood. Though his mates aren’t crazy about his methods — Sanborn sucker-punches James in the jaw after this little escapade — they’ll come to appreciate him. “Not very good with people, are you,” Eldridge tells James, “but you’re a good warrior.”

The heart of the film is a half dozen sequences, most of them on bomb-squad detail, one long, terrific one showing the unit holed up with some Brit mercenaries (led by Ralph Fiennes, the star of Bigelow’s 1995 futuristic movie Strange Days) fighting off fire from al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types out in the desert. Boal and Bigelow know that there’s enough tension in the act of walking up to a bomb and trying to defuse it; they don’t have to amp up the suspense with theatrics.

The appearances by some familiar faces — Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse — are all too brief. But the three leads don’t make you long for star power. They’re fine: Mackie as the veteran who plays by the book, Geraghty as the subordinate with jumpy nerves, and especially Renner. He’s had supporting roles in North Country, 28 Weeks Later and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but this is his big chance, and he seizes it. He’s ordinary, pudgy-faced, quiet, and at first seems to lack the screen charisma to carry a film. That supposition vanishes in a few minutes, as Renner slowly reveals the strength, confidence and unpredictability of a young Russell Crowe. The merging of actor and character is one of the big things to love about this movie. The other is that its tone, of steely calm, takes its cue from the character it so acutely observes. It’s as if James was not only the subject of the movie — he made it.

Later I may think of a better depiction of the helplessness and heroism attending the U.S. presence in the war on terrorism, but for now I’ll say this one’s the tops. (See photos of the Venice Film Festival here.