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
