An obsessive female CIA operative (Jessica Chastain) is at the centre of the film, but the quasi-documentary style (again, there are a fair number of meetings round tables) prevents anything too personal intruding. It is remarkably matter-of-fact, its excessive length almost justified by the brilliantly directed and suspenseful assault on the bin Laden compound; and the lack of preachiness and hand-wringing over a topic where one could, on past form, fairly expect it (this is, after all, Hollywood) brings a hugely welcome, counter-intuitive sigh of relief.
Zero Dark Thirty could fairly be described as being "ripped from the headlines", but not all real events are up to film treatment. The problems which surrounded the making of Psycho, which form the narrative thread of Hitchcock, are I'm afraid revealed as not amounting to a whole hill of beans. This top-heavy movie has a prosthetically disguised Anthony Hopkins as the director sparring with Helen Mirren as his overlooked wife Alma, both of them unnecessarily big names for such a slight project. Psycho struggled to get funding — hardly a big deal in film-making circles — and there are a few slight allusions to Hitchcock's well-documented obsessions and hang-ups. It strains to make a drama out of not much of a crisis by introducing a possible extra-marital flirtation for Alma. In other words there's a huge amount of straw here and not many bricks, so the chief pleasures to be had are those offered by the usual period movie — the clothes, the cars and the social manners. This is a DVD time-passer at the very most.
Last and least (but up for countless Oscars) is the phenomenon which is apparently reducing the cinemagoing nation to tears — the screen version of Les Misérables, which has been running on stage for a trillion years all over the world. I like musicals, and I'm pretty sure I'm not a repressed emotional cripple (I find it hard to watch Bambi) but this marathon of synthetic pathos was almost unendurable. In your service I lasted, stony-faced, for a good two hours, but feared that the will to live would be sapped completely if I had to stay even for the remaining 40 minutes. The performances weren't especially bad, and the look of it has a certain grandeur, but you can't get round the source material: the music is mostly terrible, bland yet full of all that empty yearning of the power ballad. It starts off melodramatically and pretty much goes on in that vein. It is the movie version of those grief shrines which crop up at the sides of our roads. If you really, really want to cry and aren't much concerned about what, then maybe this is one for you.
