"For God and Country — Geronimo"

In the years following 9/11, the American intelligence community believed in a theory that now seems like sketch comedy: Osama bin Laden, weak and frail, was avoiding a drone strike to the afterlife by hopping from cave to cave in remote areas of Pakistan, all while pulling a rolling dialysis machine behind him like a little red wagon. His robes were shredded, his beard frazzled, his nerves shot, his resolve faded.

Zero Dark Thirty is the story of another theory, one that turned out to yield a splendid fruit after so many empty harvests. It is told with methodical detail by Kathryn Bigelow, the very talented director of The Hurt Locker, another film about an unpopular subject — American involvement in the Arab world. In both films she proves adept at the language and feel of the military, and how they inhabit a deadly space and time within Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. In Zero Dark Thirty, she tells a story over roughly eight years, as a brilliant CIA analyst works through the bin Laden mystery one clue at a time. It begins in darkness with the sirens, screams and panicked voices of Sept. 11, 2011. 

The agent is Maya and she is played exceptionally focused by Jessica Chastain, a busy actress with unlimited talent. Maya is introduced in the film’s most controversial moments, during an interrogation scene that quickly descends into all-out torture. I found it ironic that she wears a business suit into the dusty cell where a cruel and dirty business takes place. Inside the cell, a man is hung by his wrists from ropes from the ceiling. He's hungry, weeping and he's soiled his clothes. 

I’ve heard of the practice of water boarding, but to see it used, even as a stunt in a movie, is horrific and claustrophobic. You will treasure every breath you take during the sequence. Members of Congress have recently said these torture scenes are unequivocally false, that no torture took place in the hunt for bin Laden. That proclamation, hollow and vacuous, comes from the same Congress that just let the country skin its knees scraping itself back up the fiscal cliff that it created, so you decide who has the facts right. I think torture happened, and I think it probably happened the way the movie shows us: a bunch of bearded CIA guys in jeans dumping water on captured al Qaeda fighters’ faces.

The torture, as brutal as it is, pays off at first. Maya is given a tip on a courier for UBL, the acronym the CIA used for the alternately spelled Usama bin Laden. Maya plucks away at other sources, online chatter, computer databases and her CIA counterparts in other countries to get verification of the courier, which takes years and dozens of American lives. They eventually find the courier — by tracking a wandering and rarely used cell phone — and track him to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the rest is history.

The final raid serves as the ultimate climax for the movie — and it might be the most authentic real-life climax to any story in American history — but the heart of Zero Dark Thirty is in the buildup to the raid. If you found Lincoln boring because it had “too much talking,” then it’s unlikely you’ll appreciate much of this film’s covert research and data gathering. There are no shootouts or chase scenes, no moments of special effects overload. The few explosions seen, including the devastating Camp Chapman attack, are based on real terrorist reprisals and are thrown into the landscape to punctuate how rattled Maya and other CIA analysts were making terrorist operatives.

Bigelow films all this in dusty locations that serve as Afghanistan and Pakistan. I admired all the little details, like how Maya’s office is a cluttered and dusty cubicle in a grimy building somewhere in Pakistan, not some underground bunker with walls of flat-screens like the lair of some Bond villain. Another detail I liked: her theories were based on research, not espionage. Maya rappelling into a terrorist camp wearing a rubbery jumpsuit to plant high-tech homing devices on RPG launchers might have been more interesting for the Michael Bay crowd, but Bigelow sticks to the facts. Instead Maya catches her breaks because she does her homework, which includes watching interrogation interviews, reading reports and understanding the complex tribal regions of the Middle East — you know, actual intelligence gathering.

This is an intelligent thriller, one prodded along with a tremendous cast led by Chastain, who let her Maya be ruthless and pig-headed. There’s a recurring scene where she daiily writes out the number of days since the discovery of the Abbottabad compound with no action. She writes the numbers, eventually a three-digit one, on her boss’ window as a way to intimidate him into a plan. Jason Clarke, who we last saw with Chastain in moonshine drama Lawless, plays the most prominent male lead, a man who questions his actions and whether or not he’ll ever be normal again because of them. Kyle Chandler and Jennifer Ehle also give noteworthy performances as competing CIA analysts. James Gandolfini plays then CIA Director Leon Panetta in a handful of sequences, including one with a line by Chastain that might be the film’s most memorable: "I'm the mother-fucker who found this place," Maya tells Paneta.

By the time we’re sitting in a hangar with stealth helicopters and SEAL Team Six — “with your dip, your beards, your vests” — the film has earned that payoff because we know that CIA intuition and research is what brought us to this point. The raid itself, representing the last quarter of the movie, is thrilling and gut-wrenching, but still far removed from an action movie. I was surprised how slow it all happened. Doors were breached, rooms were cleared and silenced weapons were fired, but it all moved at a gentle pace. The raid sequence was shot in that green-tinted night vision style, and it provides some haunting visuals, including of soldiers moving silently through the bin Laden compound, their shadows clinging to walls and doorways. And nothing will shake your American spirit like hearing a soldier say, “For God and country — Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” the code word for the death of Osama bin Laden. (Interestingly, the title Zero Dark Thirty is a military reference to 12:30 a.m., when the raid kicked off.)

This is one of the finest films of 2012 (it had a limited opening in December), and also one of the most victorious in its delivery, performances and ending. And speaking of its ending, Maya is asked, “Where would you like to go?” She doesn’t answer. With bin Laden dead, and 9/11 stretching further into our past, where we go from here is not up to her, but to us.