The Hurt Locker (2008)

The Hurt Locker, yet another movie depicting the horrors and tribulations which American soldiers face in the Iraq war; or so it seems on the surface. Surely the cliché, prosaic and now rather tedious nature of such movies would not even be considered a nominee for the Best Film Oscar. Why then did The Hurt Locker walk away from the Oscars with this award and five more? The only way to figure this out is to watch it and after years of wondering, that's exactly what I did.

Kathryn Bigelow's movie follows a team of elite soldiers as they patrol the streets of Bagdad prepared to disarm any IED (aka roadside bomb) they encounter. The elite team consists of the rule abiding Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), the highly insecure and rather troubled Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), and their adrenaline junkie leader, Sergeant William “wild man” James (Jeremy Renner).

As the story of the team’s endeavours progresses it becomes clear that James is much more interested in the thrill of danger than ensuring the safety of both his comrades’ and the many innocent Iraqi civilians at risk from the bombs he must disarm. He jumps at every opportunity to don his safety armour and enter the ‘kill zone’, risking his life and others (much to his team’s dismay). We also see his collection of pieces of explosive devices which he collects as keepsakes of bombs he has disarmed; and it becomes clear to the viewer that the movie’s most infamous quote highlighted in the opening credits, “war is a drug” is exemplified most potently within Renner’s character. It is Renner’s character alone therefore, which ensures that this is movie is not ‘locked’ in the cliché of politically driven war movies.

The story itself is not politically driven; Bigelow’s film is merely a vector for presenting the typical everyday activities carried out by soldiers in Iraq and most significantly the feelings and emotions they experience while performing their mandatory daily duties. This focus in and of itself , despite the lack of a politically driven plot, results in perhaps the most forceful anti war message of any politically driven film about the war in Iraq. There is nothing more compelling than witnessing and experiencing the emotions these soldiers endure everyday, and whether this was Bigelow’s intention or not, the viewer, let’s face it, is not going to be pleased with the suffering they witness; the suffering soldiers live though everyday in reality.

This placing the audience into the action of the film and allowing them to live through the soldier’s toil alongside Bigelow’s characters is achieved using various effective devices. Most notably the deafening silence present throughout the movie and the lack of a lavish, theatrical score creates an intense atmosphere, drawing the audience into the action and surrounding them in the setting. This, teamed with the regularly shifting POV and shaky camera shots successfully places the viewer on the barren, dilapidated streets of Bagdad, where they watch alongside the Iraqi civilians as Sergeant James and his team attempt to disarm the ever present deadly IED’s. The audience experience the activities of war as the characters do and this allows for an intense emotive response; so intense in fact that this movie was deemed the Best Film 2009.

And I have to agree. Ignoring the cunning political stand point Bigelow illustrates, this film was well deserving of its title and well deserving of overthrowing Avatar. Although Avatar offers the viewer the same experience of being placed into the action of the movie, Bigelow’s film does this unaided by 3D Imax technology; it is simply a brilliantly constructed film in which one is injected into the ‘Hurt Locker’ of war and comes out the other side having undergone an enlightening experience. The experience of a drug. The experience of war.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) review

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Lynne Ramsay

Synopsis (in chronological order, not as shown in the film)
Opening at Tomatina, a large tomato fight in Valencia successful travel writer Eva is enjoying the prime of her youth and success. Returning home to an American city she falls in love with a wealthier man quickly falling pregnant and is persuaded to take a break from her career to raise their newborn son, Kevin. Initially the child will not stop crying when in the presence and care of its mother whilst remains quiet when father returns home. As a toddler the boy becomes mute in the care of his mother and responds little to her attempts to nurture him resisting the lessons of potty training and good behaviour before Eva resorts to a solitary moment of violent frustration. Their relationship is fractured throughout his young life only taking an interest in his mother reading him The Tales of Robin Hood that fires an enthusiasm for archery spurred on by his doting father. When a younger sister arrives accidentally Kevin resents the girl killing her pet guinea pig and blinding her in one eye. The two parents file for divorce before Kevin kills his father and sister and carries out a massacre at his school approaching his 16th birthday. Eva moves into a smaller house in the area that is pelted with paint along with her car, she gets an entry level job at a travel agents and attempts to avoid the parents of her son’s victims drinking and medicating herself to sleep every night.

Review
From a wide-ranging selection of independent cinema’s most prized ingredients you would expect a dish far more sophisticated than the one ham-fistly presented here. I can only apologise for the food based analogy but for the first half an hour of the film I couldn’t help feeling how over cooked it all seemed to be. The heavy-handed approach to We Need to Talk About Kevin must surely lie at the feet of director Lynne Ramsay, also credited for co-writing the clunky screenplay. The story is a potent tale of an American boy as he grows from maligned infant to sociopathic teenager in episodic flashbacks from his mother’s point of view. Most harrowing aside from his actions is that the usual suspects of blame come into play whilst the writing never allows the complex psychological persuasion of the central character to be explored as uncomfortable moments invite us to find humour in desperately humourless situations.

The film shows snippets of sugar sweet cereal, snatches of the star spangled banner and sketches of schizophrenia, the causes of which are lazily misattributed. It seems as though the script was written scribbling down and sticking with the first visual ideas that popped into the screenwriters heads, substituting the dramatic exploration into an American problem child’s psyche from the novel on which the film is based for obvious and arbitrary judgmental visual statements. It’s as if it was made as a knee-jerk reaction to the Columbine massacre had it happened in the 1980s. “Die! Die! Die!” Kevin sporadically shouts at the screen as he plays on a video game with his loving father. Are we being lectured on the violent nature of video games? “I don’t want to leave the city” insists successful travel writer mother Eva to financially stable father Franklin, sufficiently adequate performances from Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly respectively, before they whisk their new addition to the family off to the suburbs and a house that strikingly resembles that of Tony Soprano’s - minus one point in the parenting handbook for careerism and the chase of the almighty American dollar. Surprisingly Medieval folklore is even represented in the form of Robin Hood and his exploits in Sherwood Forest with a bow and arrow inspiring Kevin’s preferred means of execution, as though surely we must be wary of the things you feed into our child’s minds.

The only regular stalwarts of bad parenting and characters of subversion that aren’t referenced are music and the movies, and if they are it is with a subtlety that perhaps I missed amongst the onslaught of obvious gestures. The recurring costume choice of a Led Zeppelin t-shirt worn by both mother and father at significant points in their lives was maybe a decision made to somehow link Jimmy Page’s interest in Alistair Crowley and the Occult to the actions of their offspring, however, I would wish to balk at the backwardness of this idea if I thought it was a conscious effort. Never though, as may be expected part way through, do we have Kevin attend a Marilyn Manson concert. Movies on the other hand are only glossed over as mother and daughter, sister of the rampaging Kevin, cosily watch what sounds like a code-era soft gangster flick.

Finally, attention should be drawn to the sound of the film, as it craves attention for the majority of the picture as if for the most part something more interesting is happening out of the frame, usually signified by Tilda Swinton’s forced reactions. When done expertly and this can be a highly effective technique as David Fincher exhibits time and time again. But the volume at which some of the sounds are escalated to in the sound mix is excruciating for all the wrong reasons, when Kevin bites and picks his finger nails or gobbles a lychee that represents the eyeball of his blinded sister – possibly a reference to Un Chien Andalou, if again somewhat awkwardly done – the sound is amplified beyond any kind of proportion. A seemingly schizophrenic soundtrack ties the series of flashbacks together and may have made for interesting listening had it not been so self-consciously attempting to replicate the quirky nature of other 21st century independent films. Perhaps the reason rock bands never come under scrutiny in the films bad parenting blame game the film is scored by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood but never reaches the heights scaled by Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood caught as it is between so many different genre signifiers. Thus emblematic of a film where maybe too many cooks have spoiled the broth, or an ambitious yet inept head chef has let her specials menu go awry on a big night in the kitchen.

Review by Matt Henshaw