agent in the room had this sort of unorthodox physical presence? Part of Maya’s struggle is to be taken seriously among men who are prone to write her off because she doesn’t fit the mold.

Instead, she forces the question: what if the best C.I.A. The thin, high voice the slight frame the fair hair and skin – these are delicate things, but Chastain doesn’t try to alter them. Rather than trying to put on a tough-babe persona – the sort that defines Angelina Jolie’s action outings – Chastain stays true to the natural tools given to her. If you watch Chastain closely, you’ll notice the layers at work. So there’s more going on here than odd casting. Much of Zero Dark Thirty works to subvert the gender expectations we might have as an audience. And as the only operative to push the theory that leads to bin Laden’s discovery, she ultimately beats them at their own game (something Bigelow did when The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar in 2009). Often the only female in the room (though not always), she uses vulgar language and aggressive gestures to fit in, even if it doesn’t fit her. Zero Dark Thirty is directed by Kathryn Bigelow ( The Hurt Locker), a Hollywood action veteran who’s had a good deal of experience as a woman playing a “boy’s game.” In a sense, Maya’s doing the same thing. It’s almost nonsensical.īut maybe that’s the point. “Then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” Chastain does her best Clint Eastwood, but she doesn’t sell the scene. “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op,” she hisses. Take, for instance, the scene in which Maya learns that some of her coworkers have been killed by a suicide bomber. Is this a case of miscasting? At times it seems like it.

researcher who doggedly pursues the most minute details – some of which have been extracted by torture – until they add up to the Pakistani compound in which bin Laden is hiding. Chastain is not exactly the barking type, yet here she is anchoring the film as Maya, the brash C.I.A. It’s a movie of tough talk, macho posturing and frantic action, and at the center of it is Chastain – the delicate and ethereal young mother figure from films such as Take Shelter and The Tree of Life. That’s the crucial question for this sprawling espionage film, which dramatizes the hunt for Osama bin Laden from the days following the 9/11 attacks to the bullets that left him dead on May 2, 2011. What is Jessica Chastain doing in Zero Dark Thirty?

Zero dark thirty jessica chastain