The Report’s Academic Approach Fails to Entertain

The Report Review

Written and directed by Scott Z. Burns a large part of the blame for this boring procedural lies squarely with Burns. It’s star Adam Driver (Daniel J. Jones) also shoulders some blame as he plays Jones as if he’s bored to tears working on a report that uncovers the CIA’s use of torture to ineffective means. At the very beginning we see Daniel J. Jones with an attorney (Corey Stoll) informing he and dropping an expository bomb on the audience that Jones could very well go to prison for what he has done. Jones says to no one in particular; “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

The beginning is as boring an origin story as one could possibly imagine. Senator Diane Feinstein (Annette Benning) picks Jones to lead an investigation into the CIA destruction of their own video tapes of interrogation in 2005. This is no hard boiled investigation like the private eyes do, the kind of investigation that actually moves and pushes a story forward ain’t what we get. What we get is the bureaucratic investigation which means Jones reading hundreds of thousands of reports. Shots of Jones typing reports. Shots of Jones xeroxing reports.

Interspersed in between all these shots of reports is Jones confronting the Senator about all that he’s learned about the CIA’s failed torture scheme. At some point Burns offers up The Report’s version of a “deep-throat” character in Raymond Nathan (Tim Blake Nelson) a medical assistant of the Office of Medical Services who tells Jones in a parking garage that he wants to leave the agency because of their torture program. The whole scene is so hamfisted it offers not one scintilla of suspense as if the parking garage as meeting place is all that is needed to create the atmospheric suspense of a secret meeting.

All the way through this boring slog of an investigation we are given hints that the report will never be made public. Diane Feinstein is, after all, a United States Senator who faces reelection every four years, and the CIA is…well, the CIA. The movie does pick up a bit during its second half but Burns seems intent on maintaining the boring atmospheric anti-suspense of bureaucratic do gooding. With the introduction of John Brennan as the new Director of the CIA this film should’ve finally begun to soar, unfortunately it doesn’t.

Brennan is predictably nasty and wily about it but his more recent connection to the Trump election is merely accidental and it’s as if Burns wants to diminish Brennan’s role so as not to accidentally make any connections to what is happening now. They are two different things, of course, the cover-up of illegal torturing (the kind that could only be legal if it actually works – alas it didn’t) and the cover up of domestic election interference are two different things and the cover up of illegal torture is what this meandering movie is about.

It is a movie, after all, about a report. A 7,000 page report and I suppose we should be thankful that the filmmakers didn’t just film a staged reading of it. This is a movie that wants us all to pat ourselves on the back for being the kind of a country that exposes the war crimes of clandestine intelligent regimes and makes them public. The struggle of the report had been all along to make the findings of the 7000 page report public.

Once it is finally made public (SPOILER ALERT) speechifying and pontification by U.S. Senators ensue. Yay for America because we did some really bad stuff regarding torture but then we went public about it and so the President eliminated the torture program and yay for us. If only the build up to this moment of speechifying was actually built up. If only Burns was able to find a suspense story and tell that other than what he chose to tell.