It’s like The West Wing ... but with waterboarding

The Report (15)

Verdict: Powerful but oppressive ★★★✩✩

WRITER-DIRECTOR Scott Z. Burns has made a film which takes itself very seriously indeed, and that’s fair enough — it deals with a deeply serious subject, the use of torture by the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

But still there is a kind of oppressive earnestness about The Report, which streams on Amazon Prime later this month after a short cinema run. It’s like an illustrated lecture by a stolid history professor, or if you prefer, an extended episode of The West Wing leeched of all the fun.

It tells a true story. When Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) wants to investigate alleged human rights abuses by the CIA during George W. Bush’s presidency, she gives the job to a diligent staff member, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver).

His eventual report runs to more than 6,700 pages, and the film attempts to bring it to life by showing unpleasant torture scenes, many of them overseen by a CIA-sponsored psychologist played by Douglas Hodge. You’d never think, given how many American sleazebags he plays these days, that Hodge was once a British telly heart-throb — gorgeously wholesome Dr Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, for heaven’s sake.

Anyway, it’s pretty horrifying stuff, as waterboarding, mock-burials and the ‘use of insects’ all become standard devices in trying to tease information from Islamic captives.

There’s not much light relief, although my wife and I found some, when Jones talks solemnly about one of the detainees being subjected to a terrible indignity, ‘forced to go to the bathroom on himself’.

Whether that’s just Burns being silly, or an actual line, rarely has that fantastically coy U.S. euphemism seemed so out of place.