The Report

In the face of it, the prospect of a knot­ty polit­i­cal dra­ma about the US Senate’s 2012 inves­ti­ga­tion into the CIA’s ​‘Enhanced Inter­ro­ga­tion Tech­niques’ (or EITs) post ⁹⁄₁₁ is a pret­ty tough sell. It’s high­ly for­tu­nate, then, that the mate­r­i­al sur­round­ing the Senate’s ​‘Tor­ture Report’ is skil­ful­ly trans­lat­ed into a fea­ture film by writer/​director Scott Z Burns, who has been qui­et­ly on form for years as the man behind the scripts for Steven Soderbergh’s The Infor­mant!, Con­ta­gion, Side Effects and The Laun­dro­mat.

While Aaron Sorkin’s polit­i­cal scripts are motor-mouthed walk­ing-and-talk­ing affairs, and Adam McK­ay favours bom­bas­tic fin­ger-jab­bing, there’s some­thing far more sub­tle at play in Burns’ more tren­chant and damn­ing film. The focus of the sto­ry is Sen­ate staffer Dan Jones (Adam Dri­ver), who is charged with com­pil­ing a report on the CIA’s oper­a­tions regard­ing ter­ror sus­pects in the wake of ⁹⁄₁₁. His search for the truth is hin­dered by the tricky machi­na­tions of pow­er at the high­est lev­el, and his frus­tra­tions become more pro­nounced as months of work turn into years in a base­ment office, with no guar­an­tee that his find­ings will ever see the light of day.

It’s an inter­est­ing role for Dri­ver, as Jones is a qui­et, thought­ful, large­ly unknown fig­ure whose dogged deter­mi­na­tion is his great­est strength. Burns doesn’t paint Jones as some cru­sad­ing all-Amer­i­can hero – he’s just a man doing his job, and doing it excep­tion­al­ly well. It’s a tes­ta­ment to Driver’s tal­ent and ver­sa­til­i­ty that he’s able to deliv­er mono­logues heavy with polit­i­cal jar­gon in a gen­uine­ly engag­ing manner.

The mate­r­i­al could eas­i­ly have become dense and inac­ces­si­ble, but Dri­ver is a strong enough pres­ence to keep the weighty con­tent engross­ing. Mean­while Annette Ben­ing pro­vides the per­fect foil as Jones’ boss, Sen­a­tor Dianne Fein­stein, who sup­ports him while remain­ing keen­ly aware that she must nav­i­gate the tricky tri­par­tite rela­tion­ship between the gov­ern­ment, the CIA and the FBI. Watch­ing them go toe-to-toe as they argue their case makes for a mas­ter­class in act­ing and reacting.

Burns also takes a swing at media out­lets that com­ply with rather than ques­tion those in pow­er, direct­ly allud­ing to Zero Dark Thir­ty and Fox tele­vi­sion series 24 as pro­pa­gan­da, rein­forc­ing the great lie at the heart of the CIA’s EIT pro­gramme: that it actu­al­ly worked. Of course, even know­ing what we do now about the CIA’s abhor­rent actions, the real­i­ty is that no one was ever pros­e­cut­ed for the human rights abus­es that occurred (and which are detailed with shock­ing real­ism here). Per­haps the only shaky part of the film is the deci­sion to show flash­backs in a thick yel­low wash, which feels a lit­tle heavy-hand­ed giv­en the already dev­as­tat­ing scenes of torture.

Still, a sense of qui­et fury seeps up through the nar­ra­tive, although we nev­er see it explode onto the screen – and it’s a more inter­est­ing, thought­ful film for it. The Report is a sober­ing indict­ment of America’s recent his­to­ry that marks Burns as a tal­ent­ed direc­tor as well as an excep­tion­al screen­writer, while reaf­firm­ing Driver’s cre­den­tials as one of the most excit­ing actors work­ing today.