The Report
The outside world imposes on and influences how we respond to movies. Sometimes a movie arrives and seems more relevant than ever, more relevant than when it was conceived a year or two before. Likewise, sometimes a movie will be so overtaken by events that it arrives like yesterday’s news, like a warning about something that no longer seems frightening.
“The Report” is a wellmade picture about a fellow named Daniel Jones, who spent a year preparing a report on the United States’ use of torture on suspected terrorists in the years following 9/11. The report’s revelations were twofold. First, it showed the nature of the torture and the extent to which it was used. And second, it showed that torture didn’t work. Along the way, it exposed as myth the notion that torturing suspects helped the U.S. find Osama bin Laden.
This is interesting, at least reasonably. But to a large extent, how you perceive the film will have much to do with how you see the story as relating to today’s headlines. There are some, for example, who will see the events here as evidence of executive branch misconduct and relate these blights on the Bush administration to the various examples of alleged Trump administration perfidy that are now under investigation.
However, since it’s just us talking, can I be honest here? To me, what we hear on the news every day has vaulted so far beyond anything depicted or discussed in this movie that I had a hard time staying interested. Yes, sure, 10 years ago I might have been outraged. But today?
Basically, here’s the revelation of “The Report”: A bunch of Americans were overzealous and did truly horrible things, in the misguided belief that they were advancing the interests of the United States and the safety of its citizens. Obviously that’s not something we can accept or ignore.
Still, when you compare it to the issues under investigation now — that the president and his administration are alleged to have been working against American interests, for whatever arcane reasons — the first decade of the millennium suddenly seems like the good old days by comparison.
Sorry to be so blunt, but to do otherwise would be to ignore the elephant in the room: “The Report” could be the best written, directed and acted version of its story possible. But if you have a political film, and it’s not half as disturbing or engrossing as any random Chris Cuomo or Lawrence O’Donnell broadcast, you have yourself a problem.
Fortunately, “The Report” is only partly about the content of the report itself. The rest is about the man doing the report. It’s about someone engaged in a difficult quest that requires every bit of his intellect and ingenuity and practically every moment of his time, over a period of years. In that way, it’s possible you can become interested in “The Report” in the same way you might become interested in “MobyDick,” even if you don’t really care about whaling.
Adam Driver, who is very good at depicting concentration, focus and fixation, plays Jones, an idealistic young man tasked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the CIA’s use of torture. This puts him into direct contact with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), the California Democrat, as his boss, his mentor and, in a sense, his potential publisher. He’s writing something, and he’s depending on her, ultimately, to get it out there.
“The Report” depicts the convoluted mechanics of government as few movies do. Essentially, this is the early Obama era investigating the Bush era, but the culture of the CIA remains unaffected, and so the pushback from Obama’s appointees is the same as though the presidents hadn’t changed. There are also shifts in the Senate that have to be navigated, the will of the president to be considered, and tripwires and mines in the form of laws that could easily be broken by Jones, which would send him to jail for trying to do the right thing.
Yet for all this, the stakes in “The Report” are never especially high in terms of national consequence. We do end up caring about the personal stakes, however, and that’s something. We know — we’ve seen — the effort that Jones has put into the creation of his masterpiece, and so want it to be published, just the same as we would want van Gogh to finally sell a painting in “Lust for Life.”
To be clear, we’re never worried about what all this means for us, just him. But Driver’s intensity, Jones’ personal story and the privileged look behind the scenes all combine to edge “The Report” into the plus column.