The Report (2019)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Report (2019) – S. Z. Burns

When all is said and done, this really is a movie about a report getting stuck in a government committee (based on a true story, of course).  But it is a very important report – about the CIA’s involvement in torture (which they called “enhanced interrogation techniques”) during the Bush administration.  Adam Driver plays Dan Jones, a senate staffer who is assigned by Diane Feinstein (on the Senate Intelligence Committee; played by Annette Bening) to investigate the CIA’s internal communications and write the report.  Which turns out to be 7000 pages long.  And which the CIA would like to suppress.  So, there’s a battle to be had and Jones/Driver is steadfast in his willingness to take up the gauntlets, in an unassuming sort of way, as befits a public servant.  The real villains of the piece are the two military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were apparently paid upwards of 80 million dollars for their role in the torturing of Al Qaeda suspects and somehow were immune from prosecution (as were all of the CIA employees involved) – although I recall that they were later expelled from the American Psychological Association.  A key theme of the film is that the “science” behind the torture techniques (such as waterboarding) was faulty and that, contrary to what the CIA PR team stated, there was no unique information made available by suspects as a result of these techniques (only lies and information already known).  The film rises to a final crescendo:  will the report be publicly released or not?  (Obama’s administration is criticised for its willingness to redact large sections).  In the end, it is probably too naïve and self-congratulatory to argue that the US is a country where the government is willing to admit its own faults and never transgress again.  But that optimistic conclusion is rousing enough for a movie about getting a report done.