Welcome back to the first DECADE OF BEST PICTURES series of reviews where we will be taking a
look at a decade of Best Picture winners over the course of 10 days. In this
series we will be looking at the decade of Best Pictures from 2005-2015 in
reverse chronological order! This seventh entry will be for the 2009 Best
Picture winner THE HURT LOCKER!
The Hurt Locker is
the 2009 Best Picture winner from acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow. The films
awards success was historic as Bigelow was the first woman to win Best Director
Academy Award for this film. It tells the story of a bomb diffuser joining up
with a team in Iraq and shows their experiences whilst showing the deeply
skewed and damaged emotional psyche of the lead character. The film stars
Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, and Ralph Fiennes.
I think The Hurt
Locker is a stellar movie overall, but I find myself frequently forgetting
how good it is. This is the first time Bigelow stepped into the area of true
modern warfare (though she had done other military projects in the past) and
gave viewers a glimpse into the wars in the Middle East. If you know me, you
know that I think Zero Dark Thirty is
a bona fide masterpiece. The Hurt Locker
doesn’t reach that level, but it is still incredibly good.
I think The Hurt
Locker succeeds from being unflinchingly believable, extremely well
written, and performed with subtlety. Although it’s shocking that it took until
2009 for a woman to win a Best Director Oscar (Bigelow is still the only woman
to do it, in fact), this award for directing was beyond deserved on the merits
of the film alone. The shots in this film are styled in such a way as to get
you in the position of the boots on the ground and are coupled with sound design
that transports you to Iraq. One scene that stood out especially to me was the
sniper scene. It is slow and plodding and it makes you feel the frustration and
discomfort of a sniper standoff. To this day I am still stunned by this
sequence and how effecting it is on me as an audience member. Bigelow’s
unflinching style extends beyond these obvious scenes, however, as she tackles
some deeper issues of PTS and dependence in the film as well. When Jeremy
Renner’s character comes home we see all these subtle moments of how
emotionally damaged he is but it is done completely within the bounds of
believability that the emotional impact of it is heightened ten-fold.
The Hurt Locker is
also impressively well written. This was the first film that paired Bigelow
with journalist turned screenwriter Mark Boal. This combination (which has
extended through Zero Dark Thirty and
the untitled Detroit Riots project scheduled for this year) has been an
incredible one. Boal has a way of writing where none of the dialogue feels
misplaced. You can actually buy into the fact that these people would say and
do the things they’re doing and that adds to the powerful believability the
film holds. This film has a relatively simple screenplay, but it evokes complex
things through the subtlety which is why this is a massively impressive work of
screenwriting for me.
Finally, the strength and simplicity of the performances
make this film come together perfectly. Renner, in the lead role, is so good at
being this bomb diffuser character who you get the impression has a few screws
loose but that is so genuine you feel for him the whole time. Toward the end of
the film he also has some powerful emotional moments (one in Iraq and one with
his baby son) that just wreck me every time I see them because of how deep they
are as moments. The rest of the cast is also really good. The two standouts for
me are Anthony Mackie and Guy Pearce who add a flavor to the film that makes it
all come together and work.
This film’s issue, which I alluded to earlier, is that it is
somehow forgettable. I have tried, for years, to figure out why this is
forgettable and I can’t pinpoint what it is. Maybe because all of the big
moments are slow and filled with frustration. Maybe because it is so “ordinary.”
I’m not really sure what it is but I find myself constantly losing sight of how
good it is. I think that it is, in some ways, forgettable detracts from the film
as a whole.
Overall, I still think The
Hurt Locker is impeccable and threw me headlong into modern warfare in ways
I never thought I’d see. There is so much brilliance in this film from the
realism to the writing and performances. The film suffers from not hanging in
the memory of an audience member, however. Definitely a must-see though.
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