The Report (2019) * *

 

Directed by:  Scott Z. Burns

Starring:  Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Douglas Hodge, Sarah Goldberg, Corey Stoll, Jon Hamm, Tim Blake Nelson

You have to feel for Daniel Jones, the lead investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee who works for years painstakingly on a report exposing the CIA's use of torture on suspected terrorist prisoners in the years following 9/11.   He writes an unimpeachable 7,000 page report which may never see the light of day, except perhaps in heavily redacted form or as a 400-page summary after submitting it to the Senate Intelligence Committee.   Pushback from the CIA comes in the form of redaction and an attempt to frame Jones on a criminal charge of stealing CIA documents for his report (which he does not).   The opening scene has Jones meeting with a lawyer (Stoll), who details step-by-step what a trial will do to him financially and how it will irreparably harm his once impeccable reputation.

The Report, curiously, does not make us feel much of anything about its subject and its aftermath.   I know we are supposed to be outraged by the CIA's tactics with both the prisoners (some of whom are proven not to be terrorists at all) and by the CIA's attempt to bury the report, but the dryness in which The Report is told left me indifferent.    The film's performances are better than the material.   Jones is mostly a blank slate, but Driver tries his damndest to fill his role with passion and outrage over his findings.   He becomes consumed by what the discovers, even to the point of potentially alienating his boss, the senior California senator Dianne Feinstein (Bening), who is just as troubled by the findings but knows she must be tactful in how she presents it.   As her chief of staff tells Daniel, "You don't have to run for reelection, but she does,"

I have no doubt of the accuracy in which The Report depicts politics and the inner squabbling between agencies in Washington.    Contentious meetings are the norm, with veiled and not-so-veiled threats exchanged, policies discussed, and lawyers sidestepping potential land mines with semantics and legalese.   With the political landscape altered so drastically since our current president took office, maybe watching a movie about pre-Trump government shenanigans simply isn't timely anymore.   This not to suggest that torture is acceptable (especially as The Report depicts it in such stark images), but the landscape has changed now.   It is difficult to work up the same frothing outrage that Jones feels, mostly because The Report is told in a rather cold tone about the not-so-sexy process of gathering information and seeing a report created which no one has the time, patience, or energy to read in its entirety.