For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has already told another female agent, who asked lightly about her plans to party after the mission, that she has no history, no family, no friends or personal life — in the film not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11.
In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.
Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.
After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?
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