Movie review: 'The Report' offers dry take on CIA's 'enhanced interrogation' program
“The Report” - ★ ★
It's hard to imagine a less sexy subject for a movie than the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 2014 report on the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program — even if you abbreviate that mouthful as the “torture report,” and even if you cast Adam Driver as the guy who was then-committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein's dogged lead investigator. “The Report” is a tough sell, even if you add Annette Bening as the California senator, and throw in Jon Hamm and Maura Tierney for good measure.
Writer-director Scott Burns frames the narrative as flashbacks to unidentified “black sites,” where we watch CIA contractors waterboard detainees (and worse).
Regularly, the film cuts back to Driver, as Senate staffer Daniel Jones, pounding away on a computer keyboard, scribbling furiously on a whiteboard or taping up photos, dossiers and Post-it notes on the walls of his windowless office until it starts to resemble the lair of a serial killer.
The casting is impeccable, and includes Tim Blake Nelson as a Deep Throat-esque whistleblower who meets Dan in a parking garage to offer him cryptic assistance on his yearslong investigation, which is said to have examined over 6 million pages of secret documents. But even with all the dramatic black-site interludes — which are viscerally upsetting and morally infuriating — and even with all the insights the film offers as to how officials could rationalize such atrocities, there are only so many close-ups of Driver's disapproving face — or Bening's — an audience can take.
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Starring: Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Maura Tierney, Tim Blake Nelson
Directed by: Scott Burns
Other: An Amazon Studios release. Rated R. Contains nudity, violence and language. 118 minutes