The Report Is the Political Thriller of the Year
When it comes to political wrongdoing, the Trump era has had a recalibrating effect. In a world of high crimes and misdemeanors, the misdeeds of yore can seem positively quaint.
This is why we need The Report—an enthralling political thriller opening in limited theaters today and streaming on Amazon Prime starting November 29. Written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, it’s a reminder of America’s very dark and very recent past: the CIA’s use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees after 9/11. Starring Adam Driver in a riveting performance that—if it wasn’t for his even more riveting performance in Marriage Story—would surely be an Oscars lock, The Report tells the true story of a congressional investigator named Dan Jones who spent five years compiling evidence that the CIA engaged in torture and then tried to justify it as a valuable intelligence-gathering tool (which led, among other things, to the killing of Osama Bin Laden).
Waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold, use of dogs, and other techniques were introduced by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, but The Report reminds us that President Obama showed little appetite to expose how extensive their use was and how little of value they yielded. The fight to release just the “executive summary” of Jones’s 5,000-page report was fierce, and if it weren’t for the steely will of Jones’s boss, Senator Dianne Feinstein (played here with perfect hauteur by Annette Bening), it would surely never have seen the light of day.
The advance buzz on The Report, which first screened way back in January at Sundance, has felt like faint praise. Critics have made it sound a bit like homework: two hours of talk, document gathering, and heated political debate (i.e., if you liked Spotlight, you’ll love The Report). It’s true that Driver is confined for much of the film to a windowless basement room and that we are treated to many scenes of him scrolling through files on a computer screen. But The Report is never dull. It’s taut and propulsive, a throwback to the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s (its shadowy encounters with sources and reporters feel openly indebted All the President’s Men).
As the film races along, it’s impossible not to be enthralled by Burns’s discipline and control. The speechifying is set to a minimum, and the scenes of torture at black sites are harrowing without feeling gratuitous. (It takes a delicious shot at Zero Dark Thirty, a torture-laden film that smuggled pro-CIA propaganda to action fans.) The villains are villainous (two Air Force psychologists who devised the techniques without any grounding in actual real-world interrogations are particularly loathsome, and you must see Jon Hamm play President Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough as a portrait of bureaucratic triangulation.)
I will agree that this film, which situates itself on the side of facts and evidence, will likely not be appreciated much beyond the MSNBC set—but that’s because we’re living in a moment where our current president has promised to reintroduce waterboarding and “much worse” techniques, to full-throated cheers from his base; where the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., recently found, through a museum-led survey, that the majority of its visitors approve the use of torture to stop terrorist attacks.
Which is all to say that The Report is less a history lesson than a pressing reminder that the U.S. has abandoned its claim to moral leadership. The film left me exhausted but also electrified—which is mostly due to Driver. He is as vivid a portrait of moral conscience as I’ve seen in some time. He scrupulously controls his outrage—until he can’t anymore. And when he lets it go, shouting down bureaucrats and self-interested intelligence officers, his fury will bring you to your feet.
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Originally Appeared on Vogue
