Kathryn Bigelow: A Review
On Instagram I held a poll a couple of weeks back allowing Followers to decide which subject should be the choice of my next feature. Kathryn Bigelow was chosen by a narrow lead. It’s not terribly surprising. Even though she’s not a household name she’s made award-winning films and a couple of action and horror films that have their fans. I also named her the number one female director you should know a few years ago.
So, let’s get into her films and take a closer look. Perhaps we’ll hit on a film you’re familiar with, but didn’t realize Bigelow directed. Or help you discover something new to see.
The Loveless (1981)
Bigelow debuted with a feature co-directed and co-written by Monty Montgomery (he would go on to do little more than produce a couple of films). It’s about a gang of ‘50s bikers who stop off in a town in Georgia on the way to the Indy 500. The entire film takes place during their stop as one of the bikes get repaired. Its run time is only 85 minutes, but for those used to the pace of Bigelow’s later films those 80 minutes feel like 160 minutes.
The acting is stilted, the writing and direction emotionally distanced, making it very difficult to connect or be interested in what happens to the characters at all. Willem Dafoe stars in his first credited role and he manages to generate mild interest, primarily as a curiosity. But The Loveless is a shockingly dull experience that supposedly was more interested in capturing a vibe from a bygone era. But I’m pretty sure that vibe - and the films of its kind from that period - are far more engaging than what we get here.
Near Dark (1987)
For her next feature, Bigelow decided to team up with Eric Red on the script, but go it alone on the direction. Red wrote the script to 1986’s The Hitcher and this was his second feature screenplay. Originally, the script to Near Dark was a western, but the duo found it difficult getting financing for a western in the ‘80s. However, thanks to films like The Hunger (1983) and Fright Night (1985), vampire movies were hot. So, the script was revised to be a modern vampire movie with western overtones.
The film is about a young man (Adrian Pasdar), who meets and tries to go home with a young woman, and finds himself sucked (forgive the pun) into a family of vampires. It’s shocking how huge a leap Near Dark is from The Loveless in nearly every way. This film has action scenes that are pretty good for a first crack. The dialogue isn’t always top shelf, but the cast bring so much of the script to life. That cast includes Lance Henrikson, Bill Paxton, and Janette Goldstein - all from Aliens the previous year - as well as Joshua John Miller and ‘80s character actor Tim Thomerson (Trancers, Iron Eagle). If you look closely you’ll also spot appearances by very young James LeGros and Theresa Randle.
The film plays like a tension between a couple and their respective families that represent different worlds. The film asks which one do they belong to? They must choose. There are several touches sprinkled throughout the film that plays with the film’s themes, which elevates the affair just above B-movie material. The make-up effects and practical effects are also impressive and Bigelow knows that cutting away can be an effective tool to cut costs and still get across what happens in the scene.
As was the case in Aliens, Paxton is the highlight here, relishing his role as Severin, the most dangerous and unpredictable of the vampire gang. He brings the best lines and most energy to the film. This was only his fourth or fifth supporting role after spending majority of the decade playing bit parts and it wasn’t long before he became a reliable supporting actor and segued into stardom himself with Apollo 13 and Twister.
As for Bigelow, Near Dark was a huge leap forward that illustrated what the director was capable of and would improve on as the years went on. It’s unfortunately a lesser-known film these days. It’s inaccessibility recently hasn’t helped; it’s nowhere to stream and its Blu-ray is out of print and difficult to obtain. Near Dark certainly worth hunting down for those interested.
Blue Steel (1990)
Bigelow teamed with co-writer Eric Red again on her next project, Blue Steel, a New York crime film. Jamie Lee Curtis stars as a new graduate of Police Academy who starts her beat as a New York City cop. On one of her first nights she witnesses and intervenes an armed robbery of a grocery store. Her actions lead to her suspension and the unwitting affair with a psychopath who has ties to the robbery.
This movie is absolute baloney from the 15th minute through the rest of the runtime. Curtis holds the robber (a young Tom Sizemore) at gunpoint, ordering him three times to put down the gun. The suspect argues and turns the gun on her. She blows him away. The suspect drops the gun and it goes missing - because one of the witnesses (Ron Silver) stole the gun and apparently sneaked away from the scene. Then her superiors question whether the suspect even had a firearm. A single bit of detective work, like, say looking at surveillance cameras or interviewing the witnesses would corroborate her story. This film is full of shitty police work that would resolve a lot of issues throughout.
And then there’s the Ron Silver character, a Wall Street trader who is suddenly seduced by the power of the gun and the ability to take someone’s life. Then he starts hearing voices. Then he starts smearing blood on his face during a serial murder rampage through the city. But then he’s normal again and manipulates himself into the cop’s life to date her. This character makes no sense and is absolute baloney. But Ron Silver sinks his teeth into it and it’s tough not to admire him for that.
There’s also some weird chauvinism where a handful of characters seem to find it absurd, if not downright upsetting, that a woman would be a cop. One character literally asks, “But you’re so pretty, why would you want to be a cop?”. As absolutely ridiculous as dialogue and interactions like that are it transitions us to one of the film’s main strengths: it illustrates the constant misogyny and gaslighting women face in the workplace. That makes Blue Steel ahead of its time and it probably didn’t get much credit for these messages.
Also, the cast is a who’s who list of “That Guy”s: Clancy Brown, Kevin Dunn, Richard Jenkins, Louise Fletcher, Elizabeth Pena, Mike Starr, Matt Craven, Lauren Tom, Becky Ann Baker, and Tom Sizemore all appear. Bigelow would reuse Sizemore for her next film.
Ultimately, Blue Steel is an absolutely disappointing and frustrating crime thriller whose themes are let down by some really bonkers and shoddy writing.
Point Break (1991)
At the time Bigelow completed Blue Steel she was married to filmmaker James Cameron. The script for what would become Point Break was bouncing around Hollywood for a few years before producers Robert Levy and Peter Abrams picked it up and looked around for a director. Bigelow and Cameron were tapped. Cameron assisted with script touch-ups, but he was working on Terminator 2 at the time and Bigelow was looking for her next project, so she got the job.
The film is an action crime film about a group of bank robbers who are surfers and the FBI agent team (Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves) who are aggressively pursuing them. It also stars Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, John C. McGinley, James LeGros, with appearances by Anthony Kiedis and Tom Sizemore (once again).
Overall, Point Break is a pretty solid ‘90s action film and another step forward for Bigelow. She amps up her action filming skills with bank robberies, fight scenes, shoot-outs, and both a car chase and a foot chase. The foot chase is especially intricately mapped as it goes through alleys, streets, backyards, and at least two houses before ending in the Los Angeles river. What’s interesting is, for a movie that features surfing heavily, most people remember the two sky-diving scenes. It actually looks like the cast is sky-diving, but a lot of it was fabricated by going on location to Utah and suspending the cast and camera around and above a giant fan.
There are a couple of moments here and there that are either ridiculous or lacks logic, but at this point in her career for sheer technical merit Point Break edged out Near Dark as Bigelow’s best film - and was her most successful, as it grossed over $40 million and would be the second-highest grossing movie of her career.
Strange Days (1995)
By this point Bigelow and James Cameron were divorced, but still professional collaborators. Cameron conceived of Strange Days nearly a decade before its release. But he presented it to his ex, Bigelow, and the two collaborated on what would become the first draft. The story is set in L.A. just before New Year’s Eve, 1999. A black marketer and former cop (Ralph Fiennes) gets sucked into a conspiracy that involves his ex-girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) and may result in racial tensions exploding with catastrophic results. One might be surprised to learn that Cameron’s focus was on the love story at the heart of the film while Bigelow more on the edgy part of it - and boy was there edge! They took the resulting treatment to screenwriter Jay Cocks, who had just written the script for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence for him to polish and make a more manageable screenplay. Bigelow was inspired to work on the film after witnessing and experiencing the L.A. riots of 1992, but it’s unclear at what point that was factored into the script. Oddly enough, the O.J. Simpson trial coincided with principle photography for the film.
It’s worth pointing that out, because the film really taps into a feeling of the culture at that time, a feeling that, unfortunately, would come back in the mid-2010’s to more recently. That feeling is one of economic disparity between races, racial profiling, and police brutality. It’s startling how Strange Days is both of the time and prescient, too.
It’s important to note it is a sci-fi film set a few years in the future at which point technology had advanced enough for people to record their experiences and then sell them for others to not only watch, but experience themselves thanks to devices that allow you to see, hear, and feel what is recorded. Inevitably, as with all technological advancements, this gets taken advantage of for its voyeuristic and pornographic possibilities. But the central mystery involves that technology to be used for very dark intentions. Yes, this is a film that is sexually graphic, but it’s also occasionally brutal as we witness murders and rape happen. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But the idea of technology that allows strangers to record themselves and their experiences for other strangers to view is somewhat prescient in that it foretells the age of YouTube and other forms of social media.
Strange Days, like Blue Steel before it, has an impressive cast that includes Angela Bassett, Vincent D’Onofrio, Michael Wincott, William Fichtner, Richard Edson, and Tom Sizemore, who gets a more substantial role here as the protagonist’s best friend.
The only problem with Strange Days is the last act doesn’t seem to know when to end and refuses to do so until it has hit every beat movies apparently needed to in the '90s after the original Die Hard: a villain falling from a skyscraper, a lesser villain coming back to try to kill the protagonist, and the male and female leads kissing before the credits roll. Two out of three of those are absolutely unnecessary and the film could’ve ended without them. I’ll let you discover which two they are.
Ultimately, Strange Days is an ambitious, yet very dark and disturbing swing from Bigelow. So far, it’s her only crack at science fiction. And it’s mostly a really good one worth discovering.
The Weight of Water (2000)
Bigelow’s next film is her first adaptation of a novel. The source material is by Anita Shreve and it seems to be a fairly faithful adaptation. Both are based on an axe murder trial in the 1870s that took place on an island off New Hampshire and involved Norwegian immigrants. Two women (Katrin Cartridge and Vinessa Shaw) are killed, one woman (Sarah Polley) survives, one man (Ciaran Hinds) is accused. In present day, a photo journalist (Catherine McCormack) decides to research the murders, dragging her novelist husband (Sean Penn), her brother-in-law (Josh Lucas) and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Hurley) along.
There are two significant issues with this movie:
1) the central mystery can be figured out very quickly, leaving the viewer to wait 80 minutes for the film to catch up.
2) the modern day plot just doesn’t work at all. There’s no significant connection to the past and present, there’s no reason to care about the characters, and the on-site research goes pretty much nowhere. On top of it all, every member of the cast in this portion of the story is wasted and given very little to do: Penn acts full of himself and lets his eyes linger on Hurley. Hurley lays about and looks about as sexy as can be so she can be gawked at or side-eyed by McCormack. McCormack side-eyes her husband and Hurley while occasionally thinking and talking about the murders. Lucas, on the other hand, is oblivious to everything.
On the plus side, a young Sarah Polley gives a performance that may not be a complete knock-out, but very much provides what the role requires.
Overall, The Weight of Water is one of Bigelow’s lesser-known films for a reason. It’s bursting with a flood of problems that drowns its cast. With a budget of $16 million the film wasn’t very expensive, but it earned Bigelow her worst box office with just over $300,000.
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
Quick: name the best submarine movies.
Now, name Harrison Ford’s best movies that doesn’t include Han Solo, Indiana Jones, or Deckard.
Finally, name Liam Neeson’s best role that isn’t in Schindler’s List or Taken.
In all three cases, I bet this film didn’t come to mind. K-19 is a horribly named and rather miscast submarine drama about an incident in the ‘60s where a Russian sub with known maintenance problems was set out to sea prematurely to prove Russia’s might during the Cold War. During its maiden voyage one of its nuclear reactors lost its coolant, spiking temperatures and causing the crew to risk their lives creating a backup in order to prevent a nuclear meltdown. A handful of crewmen died at sea while over a dozen others died due to radiation poisoning not long after.
Harrison Ford plays the captain who stubbornly pushes through the mission and Neeson plays the executive officer who butts heads against the captain. The pair pull their weight with the material, but really strain credibility with their attempts at Russian accents. The film is not exactly full of submarine action with torpedoes and enemy sightings. It’s a story of survival and innovation through determination. So, it’s a bit surprising it takes as many liberties with the facts that it does.
The result is a decent bit of drama and suspense with a dose of pathos that unofficially begins what would be a trilogy of military films by Bigelow. It would take her over five years to make another film no doubt because this film bombed, making only two thirds of its budget back (Ford’s salary made up a quarter of the budget). But her next would be a different sort of bomb.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
Around the time of K-19, Bigelow produced a TV adaptation of a Playboy article by Mark Boal. This initiated a working relationship with Boal that would prove quite successful. Boal, a freelance journalist, spent a couple of weeks with an American bomb squad in Iraq in 2004. He took copious notes and used the experiences he witnessed as inspiration for a fictional drama. During this time he also corresponded with Bigelow. Work on what would become Bigelow’s next film began in earnest in 2005 with shooting beginning in mid-2007.
The film is about a bomb squad unit that is assigned a new leader (Jeremy Renner), who hand-waves protocols and safety guidelines, leaving his two teammates (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) worried they may not complete the last 30 days of their service. It’s a riveting and compelling piece of drama that is set in a war without showing much in the way of actual combat. Bigelow focuses on the danger of each assignment: the bombs themselves, what safety protocols are being considered or dismissed, the potential danger under any piece of debris on the street (and there’s a lot of it), and - and this is Bigelow’s best touch - the amount of on-lookers at each scene and the potential risk that any of them could be holding a detonator.
It is that last element combined with Bigelow’s skill at creating prolonged sequences of tension that helps the film exceed expectations and become one of the best of her career. Casting relative unknowns at the time was also a brilliant touch, because it added to the unpredictable feeling throughout the film. Notable faces do pop up occasionally (Guy Pierce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse) and not all of them survive either. The cherry on top of the whole affair is the adrenaline addiction that’s depicted through Renner’s character. That kind of psychology makes it nearly impossible for a soldier to readjust to normal civilian or family life.
The Hurt Locker won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, among several other prestigious awards. In that category it defeated the box office juggernaut Avatar, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece and The Hurt Locker’s equal, Inglorious Basterds. It also won Boal a Best Screenplay award and won Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Editing, and Best Director. Bigelow was the first female director to win Best Director in the Academy’s 82-year history. Only four other women have been nominated since with two of them also winning.
Like Near Dark was early in Bigelow’s carrer, The Hurt Locker was a huge leap forward for Bigelow not just in career stature, but in skill and confidence. It far surpasses her previous work.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
For their next project - and what would be Bigelow’s third military-themed film in a row - Bigelow and Boal wrote a script for a film focusing on a battle in December of 2001 and the unsuccessful efforts to find Osama bin Laden. And then news broke that bin Laden was actually found and killed. They quickly pivoted and focused on the successful efforts to find Osama bin Laden. One of the results of that pivot was the creation of the character Maya, a composite of a liaison officer and a case officer, both of whom were women. Jessica Chastain played that character. While Chastain had received critical attention the year before for her performances in The Tree of Life and Take Shelter, Zero Dark Thirty was her breakout role, leading to several incredible roles in the following years.
The film features the biggest cast in any Bigelow film: John Barrowman, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Mike Colter, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, James Gandolfini, Frank Grillo, Harold Perrineau, Chris Pratt, Edgar Ramirez, Jeremy Strong, Mark Strong, and Mark Valley - most of which had less than 5 minutes of screentime each.
The script is incredibly well-researched and plotted, being sure to include as many details and experiences of what happened and how things happened as possible. We find ourselves enthralled not simply because of the torture scenes, the office discussions, or the espionage, rather because of Chastain’s performance as Maya. She was around 34 at the time of filming, much older than most actresses when they break out, and yet is still able to convincingly convey the arc of newbie to seasoned and determined agent within the two and a half hour runtime. It’s still one of the best performances of her career.
What’s surprising - and both illuminating and cathartic for some - is Bigelow and Boal chose to depict the night raid that resulted in the assassination of bin Laden. The details of that depiction are important. It doesn’t side-step the fact that many children were present and witnessed the deaths of their family members. It also only gives us glimpses of bin Laden, which avoids feeling exploitive.
Zero Dark Thirty is an intelligent and meticulous film that may not have won Best Picture or any of the 5 Academy Awards it was nominated for, but was rightly on numerous critics’ Best of the Year lists, including this one. It’s a standout in Bigelow’s career.
Detroit (2017)
Bigelow returns to the subject of race relations and social justice in America with this story based on real events in 1967. The script, written by Mark Boal, has a three-act structure: Act One: the riots in Detroit and what caused them. Act Two: the events that took place at the Algiers Motel. Act Three: the trial that held three Detroit police officers (Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, Ben O’Toole) and a security guard (John Boyega) responsible for what happened at the Algiers.
This is a film that will make anyone’s sense of social justice tie up in endless knots of frustration. The second act is not an easy watch not because of anything graphic we see happen to the black citizens involved, but because of the emotional and verbal abuse they receive, as well as their civil liberties getting dismissed by immature and high-and-mighty white men with badges. What adds to the frustration is other bodies of law enforcement that have the power to step in recognize the bad situation and still choose to walk away. It’s all well-done and that touch not only is a credit to Boal’s accuracy of the details, but another touch by Bigelow that adds another layer to the injustice.
And those injustices weren’t exclusive to the young black men at the motel. Two young women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever), who happened to be hanging out with a few black men (Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, and Gbenga Akinnagbe) in a separate room from others, are also caught up in the abuse. Poulter’s officer repeatedly insists they are prostitutes and sexually harasses and assaults them and at one point even says, “You think you’re the exception because you’re white?”. Apparently, being a woman in the situation doesn’t help either.
Just like with Strange Days, the whole thing speaks to the police brutality, racial profiling, outright racism, and even misogyny the country was being faced with at the time of the film’s release. It is a timely and upsetting film where white men have all of the power and are able to get away with the horrible things they do.
The Ranking:
The Hurt Locker
Zero Dark Thirty
Point Break
Detroit
Strange Days
Near Dark
K-19: The Widowmaker
The Weight of Water
Blue Steel
The Loveless
Kathryn Bigelow has managed to make a career for herself that sets herself apart from most female directors who are usually relegated to comedies, horror, or indie movies. She’s managed to be the only woman filmmaker who appeals to men and women consistently and, because of that, has been given the opportunities to make movies with bigger budgets (or make movies with smaller budgets look like they have big budgets) across a variety of genres and win universal acclaim. It’s been over five years since her last film, but it’s been reported she’s developing a film for Netflix. It remains unclear where that stands. But what is clear: Bigelow is a filmmaker that has built a career with more creative and critical success than failure and should be on people’s minds more than she is.
What do you think? Have you seen Bigelow’s films? If so, do you agree with my reviews and rankings? Comment below.