December 13, 2019
Imagine a dry, plodding All the President's Men with little personality. For that matter, imagine Robert Redford bereft of his charm. What would you have left?
That is The Report, a movie about a similarly important subject. America looks at itself in the mirror and decides whether to hold itself accountable for torturing detainees in the wake of the September 11 attacks. It's monumentally important. Eating healthy is important, too. It's up to the chef to serve vegetables raw or to garnish them. Here we don't have hibachi but rather raw vegetables. It's a chore more than a pleasure.
The story locks onto the Senate's investigation of the CIA as narrowly as does its protagonist Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), with no time for relationships or sleep. (Halfway through we are stunned to find him jogging on the Mall.) Annette Bening plays Senator Feinstein, Democrat from California, who enlists him to investigate the destruction of CIA tapes documenting the interrogation sessions of suspected terrorists.
Successful, he moves on to draft a 7,000-page report on the waterboarding, sleep-deprivation, fake-burials, and other torturous methods the CIA used to get detainees to talk. Enhanced interrogation techniques, EITs, they call it. Of course the CIA does not want this to be published.
Surely the gravity of the investigation into torture demands such a serious treatment, to err on the side of overbearing. Does it mean we can't include one turn of phrase, one ray of sunlight? We do have some fine sinister lines that sum up the CIA's errant ways. "It's only legal if it works," someone says of the torture. We are reminded of the memorable, "It's not illegal when the president does it," from the thrilling Frost/Nixon, and left to wonder.
Do we need Scott Burns' self-righteous attitude and epigraphs at the end? The previous two hours should speak on its own. I think the difference between The Report and something like JFK, where Oliver Stone subjects us to his own self-important Shakespearean epitaph, is how seriously we are to take the actual events presented before us. JFK is about the paranoia and uncertainty we feel; The Report is about documenting the investigation and nothing more.
Burns also presents anyone who references September 11 as their argument behind the EITs as committing an immediate fallacy. It is never right to answer one crime with another, no matter how devastating the original. We cannot become what we deplore. How a nation treats its enemies reveals its true character.
It is also true, however, that we cannot stand by when immediate threat looms for countless innocents. How to balance these truths? Fajer Al-Kaisi as Ali Soufan comes the closest to this existential question, which would have made for a much more riveting theme for the film, in his devotion to the techniques that will make the most difference.
I admire Adam Driver's attempt to infuse some passion in his role. Daniel begins a confident Harvard grad but soft-spoken, dry---perfect for a level-headed investigator and government worker stashed to grind away in a basement bunker with lead walls, no windows, and awful lighting. Some of the interior CIA scenes cast an odd warmness as well. When a lawyer tells him, "You don't have a legal problem, you have a sunlight problem," it rings true four times. Twice for him, and twice for the film.
Eventually, in scenes opposite the new CIA director and especially with his senator, he becomes more animated, even angry. This is a film where his standing from his chair in a meeting equates to passion. We cannot ignore Daniel's knowledge and research---his head is a library of the CIA's actions and internal correspondence. He bursts with this intelligence in every argument he has.
There are two sides to consider about Driver's performance. His accountant-like demeanor and dryness probably explains how his Daniel could withstand seven years of methodically scouring 1.6 million pages to produce his report. Let's also be brutally honest---isn't there another leading actor who might have inflamed his castmates and livened up the movie?
We are still waiting for a true Best Picture. This is the kind of subject matter the Academy loves---and it follows their leaning for the most part. But I have a hard time thinking they'll even nominate it.
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