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The Hurt Locker

Though it has already been out for a couple weeks, I urge readers who appreciate what movies can offer to check out a stunning new film, “The Hurt Locker,” now showing at several DC-area venues. OK, OK, do we really need another film on Iraq and our troops in Iraq? Perhaps not, but “The Hurt Locker” is even more of an in-depth and searching character study of a man of action, a man in extremis, placed in the backdrop of our Iraqi adventure and under a tension that can give you cold sweats.

The story’s structure is the simplest: in the summer of 2004, a three-man bomb disposal team, part of the elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit, is doing its job in Baghdad, led by Staff Sergeant William James (the name had no particularly philosophical implications that I know of). James, played flawlessly by James Renner, is a natural at bomb defusing, a fearless, perhaps manifestly crazy, expert who tackles his grim task with the calm and insouciance of a fly fisherman or a garage mechanic. His daredevil antics scare his colleagues, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), rightly concerned about being blown away by Iraqi snipers or bombs, and the young rookie, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who just wants to survive and get home when the unit’s duty ends in 38 days. Both men want to avoid being sent to the “hurt locker” where explosions can leave you.

The film, which was shot in Jordan, grabs you from the first in opening when a disaster for the squad kills the team leader who is replaced by James. He establishes himself immediately by mounting into the massive anti-bomb suit – which looks like a bloated brown-grey NASA spacemen’s outfit – and taking care of business. He continues to tackle these high-risk tasks throughout the movie, with each episode ratcheting up the tension, as James pitches in with a heady mixture of adrenalin and heedlessness. The last bomb sequence shown, featuring a flailing Iraqi man completely encased in bombs, is particularly wrenching.

The sergeant isn’t just devil-may-care, however. He comes to identify with an Iraqi street kid selling DVDs on the street and eventually aches to avenge the child in a later sequence which causes him to go AWOL from his base. James also lets off some steam by practicing macho moves with his squad buddies, who trade brutal punches to each other’s stomachs as a release for all the tension that pervades their daily grind.

Let me note that the laser focus of this film, directed by veteran Kathryn Bigelow, is kept on the few men at arms. Iraqis are figures in the landscape, often, but they are inscrutable, just as inscrutable as they probably appear to the bomb squad. The film is not dismissive of them, it is just depicting them as the Unknown. They are the ever-threatening aliens for soldiers who live with the hair trigger (there is one hold-your-breath sequence where James confronts a sullen cab driver which just about defines the word hair trigger).

It might seem hard to recommend to some a movie that is steeped in violence, and the threat of violence (it easily rates an “R”), but Bigelow’s command of her material (she has made numerous films featuring macho men, most recently, “K-19: The Widowmaker”) is so compelling, and Renner’s characterization is so persuasive that the picture rivets one. Further, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd helps achieve a full, pulsing documentary feel with agile handheld cameras. Whether you want to or not, you will feel – along with these men – the desert dust in your nostrils and the clammy secretions inside your helmet.

There is, also, a wonderful kicker to this film (which flies by in its 131 minutes). It covers the last few weeks of the unit’s deployment, but at its end, Bigelow and journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal (who was himself embedded with a bomb unit in Iraq) provide a fabulous transition. We have just seen Sgt. James almost blown to bits, when – without a preamble – we see him all of the sudden with his buzz cut grown out and in civvies. He is, for a soldier, in a most alien environment, an American supermarket, trolling the aisles with his family. His amazement at where he is, and perhaps what he has fought for, is priceless cinema.

Soul Power
Film fans who remember the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the quixotic heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974, will recall its definitive cinematic treatment in the 1996 film “When We Were Kings,” an Academy Award winner for best documentary feature. Now – 35 years after the fight itself – comes a kind of sequel or late-blooming follow-up: the music fest of “Zaire ‘74” as depicted in “Soul Power,” a paean to Afro-American music of the day (rated PG-13 and running 93 minutes, it opens Aug. 7).

The three-day music festival in the capital Kinshasa was designed as an offshoot of the fight and was performed in the same large soccer stadium in which the fight took place. Director Jeffrey Levy-Hine somehow came up with this (misplaced?) footage and conjures it into a rough narrative. The New York City recruitment of performers – by show producers like Hugh Masekela and Lloyd Price – is shown, as is the joyous plane ride of many of the stars as they speed toward exotic Zaire. The footage of the gang swinging in the plane’s aisles on the way back to the “home country” is raucous and invigorating. Once on the ground, the performance set-ups and the tech work and the money matters are all featured, as are some sallies from Muhammad Ali himself. Occasional scenes of Zairians and their environment punctuate the story.

But the point of “Soul Power” arrives with the music, and most all the major acts are given at least one full number. Everybody sweats in the ripe Kinshasa humidity, and the parade of African garb – along with bell bottoms, wide collars and high ‘fros – is wonderful to see.

And everybody includes performers like Bill Withers, B.B. King, Celia Cruz, the Spinners, Miriam Makeba, and, wrapping it up in style, James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” ringing out in splits and shouts to mammoth cheers from the African brothers. At its best, “Soul Power” offers a rich mix of rhythmic nostalgia and could send you back to some of your old soul albums …

Films on the Hill
While the exact schedule was not available at press time, the series will have three programs during August. They are: a 1940s Richard Dix Western double feature “Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die” (1942) and “The Kansan” (1943); the film noir “The Raging Tide,” (1951) starring Richard Conte, Shelley Winters and Stephen McNally; and the WWII film “The Conspirators” (1944) directed by Jean Negulesco and starring Hedy Lamarr, Paul Heinreid, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. The expected dates for the showings are Aug. 5, 12, and 15.