First, if you’re looking for more Adam Driver – star of Noah Baumbach’s new film Marriage Story, and appearing in The Rise of Skywalker next month – then good news! The Report delivers.
Second, if you’re tired of films “based on a true story” or “inspired by real events,” check out this wordy prologue: “Based on the Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”
But that brings us to the third point, which is that The Report, from writer/director Scott Z. Burns – writer of The Laundromat, a producer on An Inconvenient Truth – is both duller than the former and more earnest than the latter.
The story it tells is nonetheless fascinating. In 2007, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (played by Annette Bening) tasked Senate investigator Daniel Jones (Driver!) with looking into the “enhanced interrogation techniques” being practiced by the CIA as part of America’s post-9/11 war on terror.
Jones threw himself into the task, and Driver follows suit; we see him working long hours in a lead-lined, fluorescent-lit windowless basement office in a concrete building that looks like a giant sound baffle from the outside. Clickety-click go his hands on the keyboard.
By the time he’s finished, years later, he’s muttering to himself and sounding unhinged. The fact is he’s been traumatized by the mere knowledge of what was torture by any other name.
Along the way, Burns provides dramatizations of waterboarding and other brutal treatment of detainees, and shrugging acceptance by those who should have known better. “Basically, if someone dies, we’re doing it wrong,” says a CIA wonk played by Michael C. Hall.
But people did die, and the techniques provided little in the way of intelligence. Driver sums up the insanity of it all when he hears that the interrogation is designed not to cause lasting harm. “So how long is he going to be dead?” he asks of one deceased detainee.
The Report doesn’t play as a standard beltway thriller. In fact, there are references to Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer on TV’s 24 – a series that premiered less than two months after 9/11 – and the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, as if to hammer home the point that this isn’t what The Report is about.
In short, no ticking clocks or racing convoys of black SUVs here. And perhaps The Report might have been better constructed as a straight-up documentary, without composite characters (Maura Tierney plays one) and the attendant concerns of “what else did they make up?”
It would have been a more damning indictment of a recent blot on U.S. history. But even as it stands, The Report delivers a trenchant and thought-provoking lesson about unchecked power.
3 stars
The Report opens Nov. 22 at the Lightbox in Toronto, and Nov. 29 on Amazon.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
