REVIEW

Bone Dry Procedural ’THE REPORT’ Values Facts Over Emotion

Name: The Report review
Item: The Report
Rating: 3
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · November 12, 2019

Bone Dry Procedural ’THE REPORT’ Values Facts Over Emotion

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From longtime Steven Soderberg collaborator and writer/director Scott Z. Burns, The Report is a well-researched and competently constructed journalistic procedural that lacks in human emotion. Very much in a similar vein as movies like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, but lacking their towering sense of immediacy and tension, Burns’ film values objectivity and nonpartisanship most highly, allowing little room for things like a heartbeat or even the cinematic thrills customary with similar dramatic procedurals.

Often as riveting as the fact-finding mission at its core, The Report is what you might imagine C-SPAN making if they produced original content. Fastened to a restrained but committed performance from Adam Driver, The Report wants to examine America’s recent dabbling with enhanced integration techniques (EITs) in a way that’s as removed from human emotion and bias as dramatically possible. The moral condemnation and judgment ring through nonetheless, but with Burns’ martini dry approach, it may be too little, too late for viewers expecting something more emotionally textured.

Bone Dry Procedural ’THE REPORT’ Values Facts Over Emotion Driver plays Daniel Jones, a Senate staffer who’s part boy scout, part robot. Jones has no interest in partisan games or politics writ large, he just wants to do his duty to make America and the world a better, safer, more secure place. Switching his academic focus at Harvard to national defense mere days after 9/11, Jones is driven by a sense of duty that goes on to inform his dedication to uncovering inconvenient American truths.

The Report stands in stark contrast to Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 war drama Zero Dark Thirty, delivering both a scathing critical takedown of the veracity of Bigelow’s docudrama and of the American government’s deliberate misrepresentation of facts. Where Bigelow aggrandized the use of EITs in securing unique intelligence that led to the ultimate takedown of Osama Bin Laden, Burns takes this misinformation to task, revealing how it was all basically a bunch of propaganda cooked up by the CIA to justify what war crimes.

Burns plays the pallbearer, his film taking deadly aim at the reputation of Bush-era American international relations and their open involvement in archaic and ineffective policies of torture. Policies that were known to end to death and rarely, if ever, secured actionable intelligence to benefit national security. All this is important stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily make his film all that fun to watch.

Though I don’t want to get stuck in the trap of being overly critical of what a film is not rather than what it is, The Report’s fact-based, big ensemble procedural approach is, frankly, not that gripping. It’s all a bit boring, which is quite a feat considering we’re talking about torture, systematic cover-ups, and America’s international reputation, and though The Report certainly seeks to edify, those who are already steadfast consumers of the news likely know the broader story already, if not Daniel Jones’ plight specifically. The problem is that Dan Jones just isn’t that interesting of a character; his robotic, unwavering patriotism and dedication to speaking truth to power makes him a somewhat one-dimensional hero lacking in moral complexity.

Good guys don’t always make for the most interesting movie characters and Driver’s depiction of the idealistic staffer is proof aplenty of that. There are times when Jones debates breaking with policy and procedure to expedite the release of the titular torture report that he’s spent five years diligently researching and penning but he always finds himself straying towards the light and law.

At two hours, The Report also feels longer than it should, with the flow between acts failing to bring a sense of urgency, even with the underpinnings of impending political gridlock creating a kind of a ticking time bomb as the film gets to its closing moments. And despite having a strong ensemble that includes Annette Bening, Michael C. Hall, Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll, and Tim Blake Nelson, the performances by and large don’t have a lot of pop and sparkle. I have no doubts that some political junkies will eat this up, mainlining its emotionless fight for pure, unbiased truth like candy but I just wasn’t all that stirred. And no amount of facts can convince me otherwise.