Any smart woman who’s ever coped with a condescending male boss will relate to Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,’’ — even if it takes place at a workplace where torture is routine and the heroine’s spent a decade targeting Osama bin Laden for death.
Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who previously collaborated on Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker,’’ devote the last half-hour of their far superior new film to a riveting reconstruction of the Navy SEAL raid on the compound where bin Laden was killed last year. (The title is military lingo for the time of the raid, 12:30 a.m.)
The two preceding hours tightly focus on a real-life CIA analyst — referred to only as Maya and compellingly played by an Oscar-caliber Jessica Chastain in her first bona fide lead role in a movie — who boldly challenges the agency’s conventional wisdom.
She refuses to believe that after escaping from Tora Bora following the 9/11 attack — represented by a chilling phone call from the World Trade Center at the film’s outset — bin Laden’s been hiding out in an Afghan cave from which he orders a new series of international terrorist attacks.
Maya is first seen watching a terrifying colleague (Jason Clarke) waterboarding and humiliating an al Qaeda money handler, Ammar (Reda Kateb). The suspect pleads for mercy when the expert in “enhanced interrogation” leaves for a break, but Maya is no weak sister.
“You can help yourself by being truthful,’’ the flame-haired analyst tells the terrorist with grim determination.
Maya’s superiors are skeptical when she proposes that bin Laden can be found by following couriers like the money handler — a 10-year process with many dead ends.
The bosses repeatedly put pressure on Maya to shift her focus to preventing new al Qaeda terrorist attacks.
Several of them, including London’s train- and bus-bombing and another that levels a hotel and nearly kills Maya, are vividly depicted and give the film a tripwire sense of urgency.
When Maya’s only female friend in the CIA (Jennifer Ehle) is lost in an ambush, she vows, “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.’’
Maya never wavers from her determination that following an elusive courier named Abu Ahmed will eventually lead her to bin Laden’s hiding place.
Eventually Ahmed is tracked to Rawalpindi, Pakistan — and, after a nerve-shredding pursuit, to a mysterious compound in Abbottabad full of women, children — and one man who never steps outside.
But while Maya is convinced that bin Laden is there, most of the CIA leadership, including her direct boss (Kyle Chandler) are initially unswayed. More senior experts, all men, insist there’s a 40 percent chance, at best, that bin Laden is there.
Maya, who won’t take no for an answer, spends weeks relentlessly hounding her superiors as her report works its way up the chain of command.
She finally gets the attention of the CIA director (James Gandolfini) by referring to herself as a “motherf–ker’’ at a high-level meeting. Her determination convinces him sufficiently to propose a politically risky stealth raid to the White House.
Despite advance accusations from a Republican congressman that “Zero Dark Thirty’’ would burnish President Obama’s decision to go ahead with the raid, the movie does no such thing.
The president is fleetingly seen during a TV interview long before the raid, and neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney figure at all in the proceedings.
Bigelow has made an essentially nonpolitical film — far from endorsing the likes of waterboarding, she and Boal leave audiences to decide for themselves whether torture was necessary to stop al Qaeda.
Bigelow and Boal also rigorously eschew the kind of “Top Gun’’ heroics we’ve seen in so many movies about military missions.
Maya has to cope with a bit of macho posturing, even from a pair of the Navy SEALs (Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton) when she’s briefing them on the mission — but she handles it with aplomb.
And then it’s on to Abbottabad, where Bigelow thrillingly stages the raid (shot using night-vision technology) that looks unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a film.
Even after doors are blown open, what follows is a slow, methodical, room-by-room search until the SEALs’ prey is found and quickly eliminated. (Bin Laden’s face is never shown.)
In the end, we know little about our heroine’s background except that Maya was recruited by the FBI out of high school and she isn’t the “ kind of woman,’’ as she puts it, who sleeps with her male colleagues.
Her life is her work.
Like the fictional Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,’’ Maya is a consummate professional who brilliantly performs her job in an often hostile work environment.
So not only is “Zero Dark Thirty’’ one of the year’s best movies, it’s an inspiring one to share with your daughters. That is, if they’re old enough to deal with explicit torture scenes.