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The Report (2019; Directed by Scott Z. Burns)

A sober, no-nonsense political message film of laser-focused outrage, The Report plucks out one of the most heinous instances of moral and legal degradation perpetuated by the post-9/11 national security apparatus of the United States of America (and there were more than a few) and goes hard at it with even-keel righteous anger and quietly thunderous factual force. Casting as its protagonist Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), staffer for California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) who was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee for much of the Obama Administration, The Report details an attempt to craft and release a comprehensive and damning committee report on the CIA’s infamous “enhanced interrogration techniques” employed on high-value Islamist terrorists captured by the U.S. Known by their shorthand of EITs, these “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted to little more than torture thinly cloaked in Orwellian euphemism, which despite being illegal under U.S. and international law were sanctioned for use on detainees by the highest levels of the CIA and the White House.

Jones, who took a hard turn towards national security issues when 9/11 went down just days after he started graduate school, leads an Intelligence Committee investigation precipitated by the suspicious destruction of CIA interrogation tapes in 2005. This investigation lasts a decade, only seeing light just prior to the end of Obama’s Presidency in 2015, when the final (heavily-redacted) report’s exhaustive and well-documented portrait of the CIA’s employment of torture (and its attempts to cover up both the fact of its use on detainees and the inescapable truth that it did little good in providing useful intelligence) provided the impetus for an amendment co-sponsored by Feinstein and Senator John McCain (for all of his many faults as a legislator, leader, and ideologue, his own experience of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese set him implacably against the practice for life) banning the practices, which were already largely struck down by an executive order issued by Obama days into his Presidency. Jones’ team is whittled down to himself and basically one other staffer by the end, as firm resistance from the Agency, lack of cooperation from the Department of Justice (who were also investigation CIA conduct, although no charges were forthcoming), and political forces of partisanship and public messaging take their toll. But Jones persisted, and the progressive-minded The Report sees in his persistence a low-key, obsessive, impressive, quiet behind-the-scenes heroic patriotism.

The Report was written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, a frequent screenwriter/producer collaborator of Steven Soderbergh, who is one of the film’s producers. The duo also made the vastly inferior exposé of global elite financial malfeasances The Laundromat, and it’s interesting to compare the way that the recently-released Soderbergh-directed The Laundromat dilutes its political message with flat attempts at humour and self-conscious deconstructionist conceits while the less-seasoned Burns nails the grounded and direct infotainment punch of Soderbergh’s politicized masterpiece Traffic. The Report is a mildly fictionalized drama film (the CIA might argue it is extremely fictionalized, but then it’s always been an important part of their institutional function to spread damaging misinformation), but it organizes its revelations with the persuasive effectiveness of a great documentary on the subject.

Perhaps some viewers will find The Report to be a cold and unsympathetic experience because of this. Indeed, although the still-unlikely movie star Driver plays Jones as relentlessly, carefully moral and professional and therefore all the more capable of directing excoriating indignation at those who lapse in those capacities, Burns’ script barely gives him time for a personality or a life outside of his consuming labour. “Don’t you ever sleep?” the security guard who scans Jones in and out of the office asks, to which Jones replies, “It gets in the way of work.” The Report treats this line as a thesis statement in its approach to its protagonist. There’s a brief early mention of a relationship ending early in the process of compiling the report due to his constant long hours, and a less serious and information-rich movie may have peppered at least the first act or so with scenes of a worried and disapproving girlfriend (they’d cast Elizabeth Olsen or someone equivalent in the role) telling Jones that he’s getting in too deep, to be replaced in the latter acts by concerned phone calls from Mom. As it is, Burns has colleagues notice Jones’ obsession in passing, with subtle alarm (“How long have you been here?” asks one fellow staffer when Jones smothers her first thing in the morning with new discoveries in the CIA documents as she enters their windowless basement office; he admits to having been there for a few hours).

One element of dramatic license that The Report does indulge in with relish is the employment of exquisitely hateable villains. No, not the career CIA bureaucrats played by the likes of Michael C. Hall, Maura Tierney, and Ted Levine, who stonewall Jones and Feinstein and even engage in framing and character assassination in order to prevent the truth of not only the Agency’s use of torture but its awareness of its wrongness and its doubts about its effectiveness from coming to light. The Report‘s villains are CIA contractors and psychologists James Elmer Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith), who sell the CIA on their program of EITs (based on the military’s SERE program) despite a complete lack of experience in interrogation, a weak knowledge of intelligence gathering, and a dearth of firm criteria in determining whether or not their cruel, violent and sometimes deadly approach is working at all. The Report understands Mitchell and Jessen to be hucksters and charlatans but no less sinister and dangerous because of that (if anything, they are more so). Motivated by the fearful paranoid vengefulness of post-9/11 America and of course by greed, Burns leaves the duo at film’s end toasting each other with martinis on their private jet, having made millions from their work while being indemnified from prosecution by the CIA. If this final touch is slightly too on-the-nose (“Gentlemen: To evil!”), the outrage whipped up by this image of the guilty escaping justice and indeed enriching themselves from literal torture of other human beings carries an undeniable force.

The Report is full of such righteous force, and Driver (as well as the steely Bening as Feinstein, who is a far more complicated and compromised political figure than is acknowledged here) proves an ideal tool for delivering its persuasive blows. Jones’ fixed outrage is contrasted with the semi-smooth, half-exasperated attempts at political spin and pre-emptive management of potential damaging elements of the report by Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm). McDonough presents the perspective of the man who dubbed himself (with a catastrophically naïfish folly that only seems greater and more terribly misguided in the Age of Trump) the first post-partisan President, who strove to erase the history (and future) of torture from the national security ledger but not to hold anyone who was responsible for it criminally accountable in any way, in much the same manner as he declined to pursue any credible accusations of war crimes against the George W. Bush White House or its national security command structure. Because partisanship = bad. If only the Republican Party ever deigned to agree.

In the absence of legal remedies for such crimes, the movies step ambitiously but inadequately into the breach. The Report may have only minor surprises in store for political junkies (I learned more than I knew about the role of contractors in the program, as well as the CIA’s internal awareness of its issues and efforts to keep a lid on them), but for the lower-information viewer to whom the showily shocking photos of detainee abuse from Abu Ghraib prison and vague recognition of the term “waterboarding” (which Burns depicts in agonizing detail, along with other EITs like walling, stress positions, rectal rehydration, and sleep deprivation) constitute the entirety of their awareness of the U.S. torture program, it may well prove an eye-opener. That’s not unimportant, but movies like The Report, however good they are, cannot do all the work of winning justice for heinous moral and legal crimes that the politically powerful refuse to do.