East of Wall

South Dakota Will Make You Humble

or

"Life's a Metaphor, Isn't It?" "(F... Off!)"

 

East of Wall is a difficult film to classify. It defies pigeon-holing and slotting. Classification. It's not a documentary, because it's scripted. It has real people playing themselves (with two actorly exceptions), so it's not exactly fiction, even though it fits the bill of being "based on a true story." Even if it isn't. But, it could happen. That it doesn't goes a long way in explaining the nature of the real people involved. So, that's fiction "becoming" fact. In an interview with NPR, director Kate Beecroft, describes her film as "docufiction" filmed on location, sometimes documentary style "on the fly" with the actual people who live the daily lives depicted in the film. To paraphrase "Dragnet": "The names you are about to see are true. The story has been changed to project the innocent."

 

Tabatha Zimiga has lived on her husband's family horse farm for years after his death. She's raising three kids, a lot of horses—training them in a style similar to "Buck" Brannaman—and taking in strays...animals and kids, teens who through issues with their parents (addiction, incarceration, incompetence or indifference or just plain delinquency) live on the Zimiga farm working the land and the animals, and working on themselves.

I first heard of Zimiga and her South Dakota ranch on the news...probably PBS Newshour because I've lost interest in network news...and her unconventional approach to caring for all her charges. Tatted and head-shaved, she defies the conventions of ranch-owner, her property a collection of paddocks and mobile homes--horses and people house similarly--and she scrapes by a living training horses and selling them at auction, while also keeping her revolving door of kids fed, clothed and sheltered...and schooled. She's had sufficient life lived to understand...but not necessarily sanction...teen drama, keeping a wary eye on behavior, both human and equestrian. She has enough drama of her own.

Unlike most cowboys, she has an internet presence, posting on TikTok, showing off the kids' riding skills as well as the dexterity of her horses, all good marketing tools for showing off the animals before the weekend auction day. 

Director Beecroft uses those videos to show the day-to-day, connecting and interlacing bits of story-fabric, providing background on the various interactions, all revolving around the hub of Tabatha, going to court seeking conservancy for new members of her makeshift brood, keeping truancy to a minimum, dealing with the slights and jolts of everyday ranch life...and not talking about the death of her husband, who committed suicide years before. This is one of the threads running through East of Wall because it affects her daughter Porshia (a really impressive performance) who aches to remember him as he was her mentor and taught her how to ride.

One keeps looking for artifice and the film is remarkably free of it—there are only two actors, Scoot McNairy (he played Woodie Guthrie in A Complete Unknown) and Jennifer Ehle who plays Tabatha's mother Tracey (her resume is so impressive and I've seen her in so many things that the way she insinuates into the role is, frankly, startling) but you can "sense" the actors from everybody else—even the makeshift stuff feels completely natural in this day and age of corporate takeover. But, when the real people playing their real selves (though fictionalized a bit) are on-screen, it's a truly eerie feeling. You feel like you're watching a documentary, despite the occasional beautiful landscape shot. Movies do a really good job of faking real. East of Wall isn't faking.

That becomes readily apparent during Tabatha's drunk monologue about finding her dead husband, which is one of the most riveting one shots I've ever seen. Raw, profane, and bitter, all expressed through a haze of repressed regret, it's a jaw-dropping sequence, repeatedly challenging the sense of reality and drama in an audience's mind. Sort of like real life.   

Some have gone so far as to say the film is a modern "take" on the Western (if we're still pining for categorization). I'm not so sure one could call this a traditional Western per se, but if John Ford's entries are, in the end, about the struggles of making a community in a wasteland, then East of Wall certainly fills that bill.

 

It's one of the best films of the year. 

Zero Dark Thirty

Written at the time of the film's release.

"You Know That Thing We Talked About"
or
How Are Things in Tora Bora?

Writer Mark Boal and director Katheryn Bigelow have made the two most important dramatic films about The War on Terror: the 2009 Best Picture Oscar Winner The Hurt Locker and now, Zero Dark Thirty, which covers the behind the scenes investigations to track down Usama bin Laden and the subsequent Operation Neptune Spear in Abottabad, Pakistan.

The film originally started as a feature about the carpet bombing of Tora Bora, and the field work leading to the decision and was scheduled to begin filming when the raid occurred. Immediately, the other film was shelved, and Boal began writing this, incorporating his research from the previous work which dovetailed with the earlier effort. It's a fascinating, troubling story of human beings waging war on an intimate level, trying to secure threads of information on a specific target, while also trying to keep track of new terror acts that might occur any time, any where.

It focuses on one woman, a CIA analyst named Maya (played by Jessica Chastain)—her IM handle is "Maya173", but "Mark Owen," the nom de plume of one of the Navy Seals participating in the raid, refers to her in his book "No Easy Day," as "Jen." Maya is book-smart, street-savvy, but must learn "the ropes," literally, of interrogation by any means necessary. She is trained in the way of torture by Dan (Jason Clarke), who has been at this for awhile and has it down to a science—the speech "If you lie to me, I will hurt you," the loss of control, the humiliation, the physical and mental stresses, the releases from which information may come. Dan offers to keep Maya out of it, but she demurs. She will participate. She will actively sweat information out of the "detainees" in the euphemisms for prisons like "CIA Black Sites." "You are not being fulsome in your replies" she yells as she slams her hand in the interrogation table.  And when she's not participating, she's poring over other interrogations, reams of intelligence, and being a general pain in the rear to her superiors and colleagues. For station chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), the job is to walk the razor's edge of politics and prevent more terrorism—he doesn't even care about bin Laden anymore, as there are too many attacks he's trying to prevent—every attempt that gets by is a failure.

But, for Maya, bin Laden is an obsession, her white Muslim whale, and it takes a zealot to find another zealot. She'll veer off into other investigations, particularly when some of her own are killed in an attack, but time only intensifies her resolve, almost becoming a mania, and her patient investigation is off-set by a gloves-off approach to her superiors (when asked her role in the briefing by the C.I.A. director—at the time, Leon Panetta—played by James Gandolfini, she replies "I'm the m#####-f##### who found this place, sir"), almost as if her persistent pressure torture techniques are being applied up the chain.* The Obama White House dithers over action until absolute proof is obtained that bin Laden is held up at the Abottabad compound, but Maya is resolute. When more cautionary analysts give the odds at 60%, she defiantly ups the odds to 100%—"Okay, 95%, because I know certainty freaks you guys out." But, it's that certainty that fuels Seal Team 6 in their mission—in the videos below, she's specifically mentioned and lauded in Mark Owen's account.

It is a fascinating movie, but a draining one, starting with torture scenes and ending with a recreation of the raid as it went down, shot mostly in tense disorienting night-vision. The character of Maya, or "Jen" or whoever she is, is a fascinating one, a portrait of obsession and the toll it bears—she's repeatedly told that she looks "terrible" throughout the movie—and when she lashes out at her superiors for their lassitude, or just plain pusillanimousness, there is a definite sense of someone unhinged—controlled, but pushed to the breaking point. A fury waiting to unleash, she is our version of a Holy Terror, a match for her enemies, and one can't help but wish her peace...suspecting that it will never happen.

2020 Addendum: Zero Dark Thirty came under some attack at the time of the release for its presentation of torture and its techniques and the implication that information obtained by it led to the critical information that led to the Abottabad raid. The movie is vague enough and the information so voluminous that one comes away with the impression that it wasn't critical to the intel (indeed, the location was confirmed by other means). As for the portrayals being an endorsement of torture, that's a little hysterical—to not portray it would have been 1) a whitewash of what was going on and 2) leaving out a specific chunk of the shaping experience of Chastain's "Maya"—one might just have well kept out the car-bomb attack that killed her colleagues. The character is driven by her experiences, hardened by them...and by her personal need for revenge. Her torture training is part and parcel of it. 

I came away from the film seeing a revenge drama that ended up, not in triumph, but in hollowness. The dead are still dead and the threat is just as real. There's no "Mission Accomplished." Just an "X" placed in a ledger that never empties.

I'll repeat what I said in the asterisked point. Zero Dark Thirty walks such a fine line that one can see whatever they want to in it.

The FBI's notice of bin Laden's death and the Situation Room during the raid.
Bear in mind, one helicopter went down during the raid.

* There are torture scenes, but they're not commented on, and any politicizing of it is so much hot-air—one can see in the film any position they want.  It walks a very fine line, merely presenting, and if someone tries to see their point of view in it, they're merely counter-projecting.