Film review

  • The Report

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Z Burns (2019)

    Compared with the recent Scott Burns-Steven Soderbergh collaboration The Laundromat, The Report is a strikingly disciplined piece of work.  Burns wrote both screenplays; this time, he directs too.  (He and Soderbergh are among the producers.)   The film’s title refers to the US Senate Intelligence Report on the CIA’s use of torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists in the years following 9/11.  The protagonist is Daniel J Jones (Adam Driver), an investigator on the staff of Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), chair of the Senate committee under whose aegis the report was produced.  Jones’s commitment to the project is all-consuming.

    Burns expresses this literally.  Except for a few brief sequences – including one where he’s out jogging and (rather improbably) bumps into the White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm) – we don’t see Jones outside his place of work.  In a job interview (also with McDonough) at the very start of the film, he summarises his education and career plans.  Later on, he mentions that he was in a relationship at the time he first became a Senate staffer but isn’t now.  Jones has no backstory beyond this.  Burns thus ensures that a document, rather than a person, has not only the title role but also the starring part.

    The report authored by Jones and his small team, which details the history of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program during the ‘War on Terror’, runs to 6,700 pages.  In December 2012, the bi-partisan committee chaired by Feinstein voted by a 9-6 majority to approve the report, which found that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were brutal (as well as largely ineffective), and that the Agency routinely misrepresented the facts of what went on at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.  Two years passed before the report was published, in heavily redacted form (525 pages, including executive summary and key findings).  Today the full report remains classified.

    Burns’s film is, unsurprisingly, information-heavy and I struggled to take everything in.  An Amazon Studios production, it’s had a limited theatrical release before streaming on Amazon Prime Video:  viewers who watch it there may find it worth keeping a finger on the pause button in order to receive the information in digestible chunks.  That advice hints at a question that keeps occurring as you watch The Report:  shouldn’t this be a documentary, instead of passing itself off as a drama?

    Perhaps it isn’t naturally screen material at all but a piece of written journalism that Scott Burns is forcing into talk and movement.  The least typical aspect of the narrative comprises scenes of suspect torture, supervised by a couple of ‘psychologists’ (Douglas Hodge and T Ryder Smith) recruited by the CIA.  These sequences are unpleasant without being garish.  They’re not exactly a breakdown in Burns’s self-imposed discipline.  They do come across, however, as an admission of anxiety on his part that he needs more conspicuous action than either Daniel Jones, hard at research in his basement office, or the film’s various talking heads are able to provide.

    It’s not unusual to read about actors preparing for a role by imagining, either independently or on the director’s instructions, not only their character’s past life but how he or she would speak or behave in situations that won’t feature in the play or film they’re part of.  What Adam Driver and Annette Bening do in The Report struck me as an extreme example of this.  Both deliver their lines with such purpose and conviction that they create the semblance of complete personalities.  Yet the film’s severe dramatic limitations restrict them to a tip-of-the-iceberg job.  The same is true of other good actors in the cast – Michael C Hall (a senior CIA person), Matthews Rhys (a New York Times reporter) and Corey Stoll (a high-fee lawyer), to name but three.  The problem is less insistent in their cases simply because the roles are so much smaller.

    Driver and Bening aren’t faced with identical challenges.  Because Dianne Feinstein, for American audiences anyway, is a well-known public figure, Bening has the advantage of not having to create a character from scratch and the disadvantage of being judged according to how accurately she represents the real thing.  Her dark wig, particularly with the hairdo she wears in the early part of the film, is somehow disfiguring – seems to show too evidently that Bening is pretending to be an actual other person.  Otherwise, she’s entirely credible and, as always, a pleasure to watch.  Daniel Jones’s relative anonymity gives Driver a greater challenge in bringing the character to life (especially since he has much more screen time than Bening) but a greater freedom to invent.  The result is remarkably convincing.  Driver is aided by Burns’s skilful, patient writing:  Jones’s preoccupation with the report and determination to resist government attempts to suppress its findings develop naturally rather than in big, phony leaps.  Driver is also physically well cast, both as a backroom boy whose pallor suggests he’s rarely seen the light of day and, thanks to his looking not in the least a conventional film star, as an unsung hero.

    The integrity of Adam Driver’s acting, in spite of how circumscribed his performance is bound to be, functions almost as an expression of Scott Burns’s approach to the material.  He wants to communicate important things to a large audience with a minimum of commercial compromise.  Even though I have problems with the form of The Report, I found myself admiring it.  There’s an irony, though.  The timeframe extends from around 2003 to midway through the present decade.  According to Burns, the Obama administration, both during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and subsequently, was hardly less nervous than the CIA about Jones’s report seeing the light of day.  Yet the political calculations and conflicts of interest at work seem understandable and, compared with the workings of today’s American regime, less than outrageous.  In bringing to the screen the history of a scandal of establishment malpractice and obfuscation, Scott Burns has also created a piece of political nostalgia.

    27 November 2019

  • Harriet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kasi Lemmons (2019)

    Araminta Ross (1822-1913), was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland.  Around 1844, she married John Tubman, a freedman, but in 1849 escaped alone to Philadelphia, where she became Harriet Tubman.  She returned repeatedly to Maryland to rescue family, friends and other enslaved people.  Working as part of the ‘Underground Railroad’, a network of abolitionist activists, she guided some seventy slaves to freedom.  During the American Civil War, she joined the Union Army and became the first woman to lead an armed expedition, in the 1863 raid at Combahee Ferry, which resulted in the liberation of more than seven hundred slaves.  In the second half of her long life (which Harriet doesn’t cover), Tubman continued to work tirelessly for the welfare of African Americans, as well campaigning for women’s suffrage.

    Kasi Lemmons’s much anticipated biographical film about this exceptional woman premiered at Toronto in September and was released in North America at the start of November.  It’s faring well enough commercially[1] but the critical reception hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive.  Owen Gleiberman in Variety, while praising the lead performance, describes the film as ‘more dutiful than inspired’; ‘dutiful’ is probably also the word for a proportion of the positive reviews for Harriet, whose subject matter will make it, in some eyes, irreproachable.  In fact, the film is frustrating because its protagonist’s life was so heroic – and because Cynthia Erivo leaves no doubt that, given the chance, she could have gone further and deeper in her portrayal of Harriet Tubman.

    This is Kasi Lemmons’s fifth cinema feature (the first I’ve seen), over a period of some twenty years.  It’s hard to tell if the fundamental problem is the screenplay, by Gregory Allen Howard and Lemmons, or the direction.  The film never gets close to finding a balance between staging perilous incident and exploring Harriet’s personality and beliefs.  As a result, she speechifies in some unlikely situations, including a climactic gunpoint showdown with Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn), the son of her former owner.  Lemmons jettisons depth of illustration for the sake of dynamic action sequences:  there’s little sense, for example, of the physical arduousness of Harriet’s interstate journeys.  She turns up in Philadelphia with fresh rescuees from Maryland as if she’d picked them up a few streets away.  Lemmons ladles Terence Blanchard’s (melanc)holy score onto the soundtrack from start to finish.

    A traumatic head injury sustained during childhood at the hands of a slave-master left Harriet a dual legacy of hypersomnia and visions; she interpreted the latter as messages from God, in whom she had a deep and abiding faith.  The film-makers don’t seem too sure how to handle this, except in the form of clichés – as when Harriet fearlessly wades into a lake, realising this is the only way that she and the group she’s leading can move forward in their journey to freedom.  She offers up a prayer as the lake waters rise above her shoulders.  The waters immediately fall, encouraging the others to follow her into the water.  Harriet’s nickname of ‘Moses’, during the series of rescues that she carried out, is apt enough in the sense of her leading others to the Promised Land.  This Red Sea moment is merely corny.

    Cynthia Erivo plays Harriet with a passion and an urgency that always feel authentic, and has a trenchantly straightforward quality.  She also sings occasionally, and stirringly, during the main narrative (and, over the closing credits, the original song ‘Stand Up, which Erivo co-wrote).  But the character is trapped not only in a system of slavery but also in a series of well-worn melodramatic crises – a husband (Zackary Momoh) whom Harriet adores but who turns out to be faithless (and bigamous) is just the start – that detract from her individuality.  Since the script fails to develop the character even of the extraordinary heroine, it goes without saying that the supporting roles are underwritten.  Two African-American actors in particular leave you eager for more.  As the Philadelphia abolitionist William Still, Leslie Odom Jr (best known as one of the stars of the original Broadway production of Hamilton) has a well-groomed gravitas that once or twice verges on comical pomposity but doesn’t make Still any less noble.  Henry Hunter Hall is engagingly eccentric as the dodgy young man employed by the Brodess family as a slave-tracker but who becomes one of Harriet’s main helpers.

    There’s a visiting-royalty smugness about Janelle Monáe’s interpretation of Marie Buchanon, a Philadelphia boarding-house proprietor who becomes Harriet’s friend.  Although Monáe’s presence is mostly grating, there’s no denying it has also the effect of making more shocking Marie’s murder by two men brutally exploiting the provisions of the new Fugitive Slave Act[2].  Joe Alwyn does well again.  Gideon Brodess was a sickly little boy for whose recovery the child Harriet prayed.  Alwyn transmits that past into the adult Gideon whose viciousness is always fused with a sense of infirmity.  Jennifer Nettles isn’t bad as his mother but the white cast’s roles are otherwise minor in terms of screen time, and the result is predictable.   Most of the actors make the most of the little they’ve got by being hammily nasty and Kasi Lemmons is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to discourage this.  The appalling normality of racialised abuse and violence in the society Lemmons describes is sacrificed in favour of villainous histrionics.

    26 November 2019

    [1] At the time of writing, Wikipedia is showing the worldwide box-office takings at $37.1m.  The production budget was around $17m.

    [2] This legislation is described on Wikipedia as ‘one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise [between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers] and heightened Northern fears of a “slave power conspiracy”. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate’.

     

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