SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “A House of Dynamite,” now streaming on Netflix.
The political thriller “A House of Dynamite” is all about a chaotic and unstable situation — and it’s also, in a situation with far lower stakes than what the film depicts, been the victim of one.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow in her return to filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus, this movie is one among several whose fortunes have vacillated wildly in the early going of the Oscar race. “Buzz” — as opposed to viewership numbers or eventual awards nominations — is truly unquantifiable, but after receiving lavish critical praise out of the Venice International Film Festival, Bigelow’s latest cratered when it played at the New York Film Festival. A press-and-industry screening where the film’s final moments were said to be met with outright laughter has been much-discussed.
Related Stories
That ending seems, for many, to be the final sticking point about a movie that, despite its initial popularity (it currently sits at No. 1 on the Netflix viewership chart, outdrawing even “KPop Demon Hunters”), has frustrated and stymied viewers. The action of “A House of Dynamite” plays out thrice, in a stretched-out version of real time, as we see various tiers of the federal government respond to a missile of unknown origin imminently striking Chicago.
Popular on Variety
For those who hadn’t been familiar with the movie’s structural conceit going in, the repetition (including the presentation of some information multiple times across the story’s three tellings) may have played awkwardly. And the film concluding by cutting away after the President (Idris Elba) makes a decision about whether to launch retaliatory strikes and only showing brief footage of various characters, both known to us and not, heading for a nuclear bunker, seems to have felt to some insufficiently definitive. “A House of Dynamite,” the argument goes, made a promise — to show us what happens when the United States is struck by a nuke. Does it lack the courage of its convictions?
Well, no. (Trust social media to decide that the director who, more than a decade ago, came under fire for her brutally frank depiction of torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” has now lost her nerve.) “A House of Dynamite” may currently be poorly served by its being presented on a household-utility streaming service somewhat out of context — in that, for all the dudgeon of its story, it ends on a note of poetic understatement.
But then: We don’t need to see the bomb make impact, or what happens after Elba’s head of state makes his choice, to understand that the world as we know it has ended. Indeed, inasmuch as I consider “A House of Dynamite” flawed, its imperfection lies in Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay overexplaining to us, throughout, that the scenario is as dire as it is. (Oppenheim, the writer of “Jackie” and of the Netflix series “Zero Day,” is a former television news executive, and is very at home in explicatory mode.) By the time Elba makes an impossible choice — whether to sit pat and wait to see what happens, or to blindly fling weapons at political adversaries that may or may not be responsible — we know what he’ll decide. And we understand what the consequences will be.
There’s little grandeur to “A House of Dynamite,” for all of the high-flying implications of its storyline; the end of the world, it tells us, will be overseen by government officials trying to figure out how to get their Zoom conference to work. The one notable onscreen death — the suicide of Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defense character — is shot from far away and with no particular cue from the shotmaking or score; a fellow journalist at my screening asked me, after the credits rolled, if it had happened at all. And small details in the closing sequence are telling, and easily missed. (This is true of various grace notes throughout the story, like the repeated hints that Elba’s character is callow and in over his head before, in the end, he allows his military aide to talk him toward nuclear escalation.)
The various government officials seeking shelter look to be in states of shock as they move toward buses where seats are in short supply; as Greta Lee’s character and her young son move across the screen, voices of military-police officers inform us that one bus is already full and ready to be dispatched, while another has a mere two seats left. The potential for all of these people to escape is slipping away, and they’re the ones with the appearance of access. As the camera moves away from the officials boarding buses (and from one unhappy woman whom we’re told, in voiceover, is “not on the list”), the buses’ destination comes into view: An onscreen chyron indicates that we’re headed to Raven Rock, a “self-sufficient nuclear bunker.” (In a brief coda, we see a soldier on his knees in prayer — the only recourse he has left.)
The point that’s been made throughout lands with a painful finality: The only safe place on earth is dug into the side of a mountain. Which means that all of those, from those turned away from the buses to those who never had a chance of boarding… A viewer’s brain attempts to reject what follows logically.
Which may begin to account for the ending’s unpopularity. I’m sympathetic to those who wanted to see what came next, but the film’s invitation to use your imagination leads those who haven’t already turned on the film to think through a scenario that hits far harder than anything CGI could conjure. This movie is about the procedure of government running up against mortal peril and finding itself unequipped to respond. Its vision of our last days is not one of fire and ash, but of a government employee dragging her tote bag and her kid to the bunker to try to figure out if what will be left of humanity has a future at all. The first of those visions would certainly be scary. But the one Bigelow chose is utterly terrifying. It deserves a second look from any audience members who have the nerve.