Scott Z Burns is the writer-producer who in collaboration with Steven Soderbergh has helped create a number of quirky films on conspiracist-paranoid themes, most recently the scattershot satire The Laundromat. Now he makes his feature directing debut with a more sober, downbeat and valuable docudrama about US Senate researcher Daniel J Jones and his decade-long battle to publish the gigantic report he’d written on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of “extreme interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding), a report impeded at every step by the agency and the White House itself.
The film does a good job at showing how the right succeeded in framing the debate in terms of wussy-liberals-are-squeamish-but-torture-gets-answers. The point of Jones’s report is that torture did not get answers. This is not a Watergate-type tale of journalist-heroism; the person risking jail and meeting shadowy informants in underground carparks is Jones himself, played by Adam Driver with a cool, calm deliberation, although sometimes Driver is a little too impassive. People will occasionally say to him: “You look tired …” Does he?
Annette Bening plays Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence (and Jones’s boss); Jon Hamm plays Denis McDonough, the Obama chief of staff who is deeply uneasy about the report, being employed by a drone-enthusiast administration keen to work with the CIA; and Douglas Hodge plays the US air force psychologist James Mitchell, credited with inventing the Torture 2.0 techniques for the CIA – a rackety figure who is this story’s G Gordon Liddy.
In its way, The Report is a return to the “war on terror” movies from a decade ago, such as Lions for Lambs, The Kingdom and Rendition. (It was this third film that interestingly quoted Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: torture victims “speak upon the rack / Where men enforced do speak anything.”) Jones is shown dismissing the TV drama 24, in which Jack Bauer gets quick answers out of people by torturing them – and who knows how influential that TV show was in terms of public policy? – and frowningly watching a trailer for the most famous war-on-terror movie of all: Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, a film that notoriously appeared to endorse the CIA’s official line that torture gets results, if only indirectly. The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.
• The Report is released in Australia on 14 November and in the UK and the US on 15 November.
