The Comey Rule review – are we ready for the first Trump TV drama?
The Comey Rule, a new miniseries from Captain Phillips scribe Billy Ray, airing in two parts, attacks the question of “Who is James Comey?” on two fronts.
Ray shines when working in the literal, informational sense, as he lays out the events of the months surrounding Donald Trump’s election with brisk procedural expertise. But in the soul-searching abstract, an already delicate subject undergoes an ethical portraiture fraught with misjudgments. However wittingly, the writer-director has assembled a dutiful and comprehensive account of Comey’s failures, which nonetheless attempts to vaunt its protagonist as a tragic hero simply too good to survive in this compromised world. As big pills to swallow go, this one’s approximately fist-sized.
Comey rose to prominence for most Americans in late 2016, when he ordered a top-to-bottom investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email servers in his capacity as director of the FBI. His decision to do so in an unusually public fashion, and so close to such a tightly contested election, struck many on the left as an attempt to cast a pall on Clinton’s credibility. His eventual conclusion that she hadn’t done anything prosecutable displeased many on the right, and his choice to re-open the case file with mere weeks left on the clock in light of a newly discovered laptop seemed to anger just about everyone. Having eroded all goodwill with those reading the daily headlines bearing his name, he stayed on under Trump for a brief handful of months before an unceremonious sacking. A baffled populace (represented first by a latenight snippet in which Stephen Colbert compares Comey to Harry Potter character Severus Snape) wondered where this man’s allegiances lay, and what the hell he thought he was doing.
Documented with a journalistic attention to minutiae, the behind-thescenes mechanics of these seismic policy calls make for crackling drama. As in his writing on everything from Flightplan to State of Play to the recent Richard Jewell, Ray demonstrates a proficiency for rendering the insidertalk of an industry comprehensible to outsiders without dumbing it down. The urgently delivered dialogue about packets and memos, while not quite at the high standard set by last year’s The Report, communicates what the realworld professionals find so fascinating in this outwardly dry job. (Ray does also revive his unsavory archetype of the cutthroat woman willing to use her sex appeal to get ahead – Olivia Wilde’s Richard Jewell character reincarnated here as Oona Chaplin’s coarse-mannered staffer Lisa Page.)
In these meetings, Comey makes gargantuan errors in his game-time calls while the advisers in his orbit warn him of the exact outcomes that allowed Trump to seize and amass power. He willfully blinds himself to the far-reach