The Report

In September 2016, Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian broke the story of Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), chief investigator of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA’s use of so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT), chaired by Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening).  Jones and team spent six years pursuing the matter, poring over 6.3 million pages of classified documents, ultimately publishing their findings in a 525-page report which concluded, among other things, that the CIA grossly exaggerated (read: lied about) the effectiveness of the program.  Tensions mount when another FBI agent, Ali Soufan (Fajer Al-Kaisi), puts the screws to EIT’s “pioneer” psychologist, James Mitchell, eventually culminating in the Abu Ghraib revelations.

Scattered throughout THE REPORT, these and many other factoids seem as though they’re taken directly from Ackerman’s piece.  That is, when we’re not being hit with political zingers—”Knowing how to deal with children is a highly useful skill here on the Hill,” says Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm)—or hammered with nods and winks (the tan suit), we’re beaten down with expository dialogues.  Characters name drop every cabinet member by his or her formal title in case the two or three people who didn’t watch any news from 1990-2012 don’t know or can’t Google who Condoleezza Rice is.  When Gretchen (Joanne Tucker), an analyst, tritely threatens Dan, “Your report will never see the light of day,” it’s actually surprising we’re watching the event and not Dan’s account of it.

At one point, embattled CIA Director George Tenet (Dominic Fumusa) seems so done with the countless voiced-over recollections, he begins to “blah blah” through the infamous August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief that George W. Bush was chided for skimming.  But it doesn’t even end there.  Eventually, someone turns on the TV at the precise moment the filmmakers think we might not connect the endless mentions of EIT, Cheney, water torture, and CIA Black Sites—each in the news for several years—so someone turns on the news and now we’re watching someone watching a television program in which the topic of discussion is Kathryn Bigelow’s ZERO DARK THIRTY.  Will the streaming video release of THE REPORT simply be an hour and fifty-nine minutes of the Rottentomates score read aloud by Adam Driver?

While Bening’s perfunctory imitation of Senator Feinstein drags, Driver and Hamm wring out otherwise energetic performances in spite of the staid marathon of bullet points and Congressional memos transliterated into painfully unyielding line readings.  Rife with exposition, the film feels like an Eighth Amendment violation.