“Is that you, John Wayne?”
So smirks Matthew Modine’s Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s great Vietnam film — and the movie that, more than any other (at least, in its combat-centered second half), casts a stylistic shadow over the hair-trigger raggedy-existential look and mood of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow, like Kubrick, unfurls her potent and gripping war movie in a desolate trashed landscape of urban detritus, full of jagged zooms and off-kilter angles, where nothing — not God or fate, not your fellow soldiers — can ever truly protect you. In Full Metal Jacket, Joker mocked the very notion of “John Wayne,” because what Wayne represented was the kind of solid, white-bread American heroism that Vietnam had exposed as an anachronism — a Big Lie. The chaos of Vietnam, the movie implied, didn’t breed any more John Waynes. It bred terror and madness: borderline sociopaths dressed as soldiers.
If war was “insane” in Full Metal Jacket, then in the squalid desert maze of The Hurt Locker war barely pretends to be hooked up to a higher purpose. An opening title informs us that “War is a drug,” and the movie’s central character, the fearless bomb defuser played by Jeremy Renner, is presented as an inscrutable cock-of-the-walk danger junkie, the kind of glorified, transplanted frat-house daredevil who could only exist in a place like Iraq. We’ve seen this sort of combat addict before, in most of the Vietnam films. Full Metal had Adam Baldwin’s boyish, hulking savage beast Animal Mother, and Platoon was haunted by the scarred face of Tom Berenger’s squad leader, a man whose broken soul feasted on the hell of battle.
Jeremy Renner is the ideal actor to play the Iraq-war descendent of these suicide-squad thrill junkies. I first realized what a remarkable talent he is when I experienced the audacity of his performance as Jeffrey Dahmer in the little-seen 2002 indie Dahmer (here’s my original review). In The Hurt Locker, Renner is just as vivid. Everything about him is eccentrically fascinating: his slightly squashed baby face, with its sandpapery skin and star-child eyes, and the what-the-hell dixie-kid bravura with which he stares at those bomb wires, fixated, coaxing them out of the sand or the garbage bags in which they’re hidden, so that he can snip through their danger.
The movie implies that you’d have to be a little crazy to be this calm in the face of a buried metal-tank explosive that’s three inches from your face. Look closer, though, and you’ll see that the secret weapon of The Hurt Locker — what makes the movie enthralling to watch, but also, beneath the raw jostling “reality” of Bigelow’s filmmaking, a pop fantasy in a way that the Vietnam films were not — is that Renner’s character, for all the war-is-a-drug chatter, is never, ever anything less than a cathartically admirable savior-hero. He’s even rather courtly, a quality that we assume is ironic, but that turns out to be anything but. He’s John Wayne reincarnated in the body of a rap-generation leatherneck.
In The Hurt Locker, Renner takes care of those bombs with nuthin’ to it! aplomb. He’s a loner in his courage, not quite perfect at following orders, but only because he knows that the missions depend on how far he can put himself out there. He’s soft-spoken and modest, and he befriends an Iraqi boy who sells him DVDs. Even his one high-tension episode of “abandon,” when he sneaks off base to investigate what happened to the boy, is presented as a trek of reckless compassion — it’s like a miniature, compacted version of Wayne’s crazy-noble quest in The Searchers. In The Hurt Locker‘s spectacular climax, when Renner attempts to defuse a thicket of explosive devices that have been strapped, and padlocked, onto an Iraqi civilian, even his failure is fraught with honor. “I’m sorry!” he yells, those eyes squinched in anguish. “I’m sorry!” Here, at last, the character’s real addiction is laid bare: He’s a junkie for saving lives.
In The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner embodies the kindred spirit of another movie character, all right, but it’s not Animal Mother or Platoon‘s mutilated battle psycho. It is, rather, John Wayne updated to the action-movie mystique of one of Kathryn Bigelow’s most enduring creations: the fearlessly admirable Zen surfer/bank robber/adrenaline junkie played by Patrick Swayze in Point Break. And maybe that’s why the movie, for all its heightened bravura, is something less than great. The Hurt Locker is a riveting experience, but it’s an Iraq war film that pivots around a dark-side daredevil…without a true dark side.
I’m extremely confused. OG completely destroyed this movie when it first played at the Toronto film festival last year. He was right the first time; while, yes, this movie does have some inherent suspense, there is no structure to any of it, no characterization, and some of it (like the scene where Renner leaves the army base) is completely pointless.
Yes, Jordan, I’m confused as well. If my memory is correct, he went so far as to say he hated it. If so, this is maybe the biggest about-face I’ve ever seen a critic make.
He’s not praising the film. He’s analysing one character, and not in the most positive way
I don’t remember him writing anything. But this is a great article.
all scenes in a film should move the plot forward and/or create character. not only does the scene where sgt. james leaves the base to find the iraqi boy build tons of character by showing you that he is compassionate, committed to more than just defusing bombs, and also capable of being wrong, which is how it also moves the plot forward by showing the audience that things are not as they seem and under that kind of stress maybe a soldier’s mind can’t always be trusted, which you understand when the boy turns up later. and since when is no structure such a bad thing? i see this movie as 39 days in the life… it’s fascinating, truthful, unbiased and unflinching. that’s good enough for me!
I completely agree with your first sentence, minus the “or.” I certainly think this film was trying to build his character in relation to the Iraqi boy, but I felt that there was an inherently trite quality to it. To me, the filmmakers placed the boy in the film so transparently, that later on, when Renner’s character left the army base, the moment fell painfully flat. I thought that about most of the film; the dialogue had a pushy realism to it, as if the screenwriters bent over backwards for real, real, real, with an extra helping of… real! It just took me out of the moment far too often. The acting was fine, but I think the problem with this movie began with the script. I really can’t wrap my head around the critical orgasm happening here.
Jordan… I think your problem is that you are trying to wrap your head around an orgasm. Don’t do that. The image alone is snarky, let alone the concept. As for “Hurt Locker”, it’s one of the most riveting films I’ve experienced in years. One of the most complete films as well. The script, direction, acting, cinematography, production design, editing, sound, make-up, background were so of a cohesive piece that I was absolutely swept up in the story from beginning to end. I’m sorry neither you nor OG liked the movie. I found it more than worthy of two hours of my time.
I think you and I, Owen, see similar things in the film, but we reach radically different conclusions. I do think The Hurt Locker breaks the arc of Hollywood war films that have in recent years moved to extreme unheroic dehumanization. And you have accepted that as the reality of war, you seem wedded to crazed soldiers as one dimensional brutes, and any departure constitutes error or a return to John Wayne.
Your mention of John Wayne, for the most part, is off the mark. It implies that Bigelow has returned the war film to romanticized fantasy. I dont think that’s a fair characterization of what’s going on. It ignores the fact that The Hurt Locker is quite awake to the horror of war. It simply doesn’t see that as the only thing going on in it, and it accepts the possibility of masculine fulfillment amidst its horror and peril. I personally think that’s a more realistic portrayal of war than either the romanticized or de-humanized portraits.
Rather, I think what Bigelow has accomplished with The Hurt Locker is to re-humanize and re-heroicize war without falling into the trap of re-romanticizing it.
As a vet, I think the portrayal was the most accurate I’ve seen in a while. I understood why every scene was there, and why they took some liberties with how some of those missions would’ve been carried out. However, I would have liked to have seen more of when he was back home, because I think that’s the harder part for men like that in the service.
Owen is right. Even in a sly attempt to make a dark character likable, Bigelow forgot to include his darkside. I go to movies to see real, thoughtful characters. Think about Pulp Fiction… those are real people with good, bad and grey sides to them. Just when you’d right off a character as ruthless, he would turn out to have a noble, compassionate streak (think Butch in that movie.) I agree about the John Wayne characterization-as-flaw. As if Owen is saying that to make a war movie is hell because if you can’t present the darkside of man in all its ugliness, then you might cop out and settle for the cowboy in the white hat riding off to sunset (John Wayne)
Unfortunately most people who have served in Iraq or the Afghan theatre will watch this movie in absolute disbelief. How could they get it all so damn wrong.
Wrong uniforms, wrong way to defuse bombs, wrong way to portray bomb disposal experts, wrong way to show how a military TEAM WORKS TOGETHER. The main character seen running down a main st in Bagdad? Give me a friggin BREAK! what planet was he on when he spent two weeks with a real team only to stuff it up so badly? Or was it the directors fault for having such an awful eye for detail. This movie may be entertaining but its anything BUT accurate. I am certain most military personal would take the portrayal of thier professions as nothing less than an absolute insult to ones intelligence. Trust the yanks in hollywood to screw up a good story!
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