A broken Rule
New James Comey biographical series as self-satisfied as its Washington subject
The Comey Rule Debuts Sunday, Crave
The first character we hear speak in The Comey Rule, Showtime's two-episode limited series about the unhappy tenure of the former FBI director, is not James Comey at all.
Instead, it's former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, played by Scoot Mcnairy, who starts us off, pulling Comey's memoir A Higher Loyalty from a shelf and complaining about its self-dramatizing antics.
“In governance, there are people who do the work and there are showboats,” Rosenstein says. “Jim was always a showboat.”
Not even most Comey fans might contest this point. Comey's late reopening of the case against Hillary Clinton is seen by many as decisive in delivering the election to Donald Trump.
But the man himself has tended to depict it as a personal drama in which he played hero — an argument compelling enough to a segment of the audience to have made his book a bestseller, and to have generated this show.
The title of his memoir says it all: For Comey, the most recent presidential contest came down to a war staged within himself, in which pragmatism or a willingness to cede the stage was superseded by a devotion to ideals that he doesn't mind telling you are lofty. That makes Jeff Daniels, who on HBO'S The Newsroom played a media figure who became famous and beloved for lecturing people, an apt casting choice.
Comey's story, here, is neatly divided in two. In the first episode ( beginning after Comey's fall but then flashing back), we see Comey's rise at the FBI and his tenure there before Trump, leading up to election night 2016.
The next instalment depicts Comey's slow-motion fall, as the president his decisions helped create seeks in Comey an ally, and then torches him for insufficient dedication to the cause of Trump, played by Brendan Gleeson as a wheedling, insidious figure whose flashes of rage punctuate a sort of mafioso finesse.
The show's narrative cleanness — the upswing and the downswing, a big rupture in the centre, and values carried throughout — generates a sort of tidiness throughout that looks a lot like writerly laziness. Russian operatives are shown toasting their victory in the street before an onscreen chyron hits reading Election Day. And in an absolutely grotesque failure of tone and judgment, the camera pans through a sea of dead bodies, their phones still ringing with loved ones fearing the worst, then rises up to depict Comey contemplating them with arms forcefully planted on hips.
He asks an aide to gather the first responders to the Pulse nightclub shooting, so that he can thank them. If this invocation of a foundational tragedy for the modern queer community is meant to show off Comey's gutsiness, it does the opposite, suggesting that no credible and proportional defence of Comey is possible. We must trot out the dead to show his strength; it is, perhaps, chaos on which he, like the boss who fired him, thrives. Writer-director Billy
Ray has done strong work before. Captain Phillips, which he wrote, and Shattered Glass, which he wrote and directed, are modern classics of precisely this genre of condensing recent history into straightforward narrative. His characters here float in and out with only the most short-handed of explanation (Sally Yates, played by Holly Hunter, is a lawyer who acts like a Holly Hunter character), and Daniels's Comey prides himself on being practically post-human, a creature governed by his supercilious awareness that he is in the right.
The movie bends and strains to accommodate Comey's showy displays of duty and righteousness, such that by the time he meets Trump, Comey has had anything about him that we might grip onto sandblasted away by honour. What might have been a human tragedy about a man whose belief in the purity of institutions led to those same institutions' coming apart under a tyrant is, instead, largely a fable about a hero.