Drama pales next to 2020 election
Showtime’s two-part drama “The Comey Rule” follows former FBI director James Comey through the chaos and disruption of the 2016 election and the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
I know, an inside-the-Beltway miniseries is just what you want to see while you’re hunkered down at home waiting out the pandemic with less than six weeks until the election. There is good reason, however, to revisit the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton, Pizzagate, Russian kompromat, pee tape era. By deconstructing the past, the miniseries shows what could and may go wrong heading to the polls on Nov. 3.
But the star of this drama, which premieres Sunday isn’t Comey or Jeff Daniels, who plays him. It’s the staggering chain of
events.
The bombshells arrive so fast and furious that one can’t help but feel sympathy for Comey, even though he was deemed “The Most Hated Man in America” after potentially swaying the election in Trump’s favor. Breaking with FBI election-year protocol, Comey publicly announced
that the bureau was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s endlessly discussed emails just days before voters went to the polls in 2016. He did not mention the bureau’s examination of Russia’s dangerous ties to Trump and his campaign.
Despite all of the authentic, real-life political fireworks they had to work with in this production, which is based on Comey’s bestseller “A Higher Loyalty,” “The Comey Rule” still comes off flat — and even boring — in places. It’s as if the cast and narrative could not compete with the larger-than-life absurdity of the actual people and events they’re depicting.
Take the role of Comey himself. The real man is an enigma — he’s stiff, steeped in FBI protocol, yet personable, even charming, in an awkward sort of way. Daniels doesn’t capture that nuance, though he does convincingly portray how conflicted Comey felt between protecting the American people, protecting the bureau and serving the president.
Trump (played by Brendan Gleeson) is another tricky figure. The president is shamelessly full of bluster, not to mention unabashedly ill-informed — and then, of course, there’s the hair. Gleeson is a fine actor, but it’s almost impossible to portray Trump on screen without it looking like part of a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Gleeson does an admirable job, but it’s hard to upstage POTUS in the spectacle department.
These caricatures might distract from the story, but “The Comey Rule,” written and directed by Billy Ray, is still worth watching. It does an impressive job of teasing out the tangle of influences that changed the face of American politics four years ago this autumn. “The Comey Rule” is a cautionary tale about what happens when we put all of our faith in the system, and it fails — or perhaps it’s about what happens when we lose all faith in the system after it fails us. There’s a lesson in here somewhere, if only we were far enough along to see the answers.