BEFORE: Another day, another screener - they campaigned hard for this one to get some Oscar nominations, because I kept seeing my boss's e-mails urging him to come to one of their NYC screenings. Clearly the campaign didn't work, because the film got zero nominations, and the film only grossed $232,000 worldwide. So it went to Amazon Prime pretty quickly, and that's how I watched it, even though I had the screener disc. Better clarity on the streaming, plus I know I can turn the subtitles on, and that's true for most screeners, but not all.
This time, it's Jon Hamm who carries over from "Richard Jewell". He played an FBI agent in that film, but here he plays Obama's chief of staff Denis McDonough.
THE PLOT: Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post-9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets.
AFTER: My first problem with this film, and this came up during award season when I saw all those screening invitations, is what, exactly is the name of the movie? The poster and all the promo materials show a word that's crossed out, as if it's been redacted from a confidential file, so what the hell? I was thinking of it as "The BLANK Report", but it also came out around the time of the Mueller Report, so I thought maybe there was some connection there. Now, months later, I can see more clearly that the missing word is "Torture", so should the film be called "The Torture Report"? That would make sense, but no, the official title of the film on IMDB is just "The Report", which sounds like the most boring title ever. I'm starting to understand why nobody went to see this movie in the theaters, people stayed away in droves. I think it's a real problem when the name of the film gets in the way of the marketing, like last year they forgot to put "The X-Men" in the title of the "Dark Phoenix" movie, so it's possible that people unfamiliar with the Dark Phoenix storyline from the comics didn't know that movie was part of the popular X-Men franchise. They've since re-titled it, and I think the last "Star Wars" film had some issues with re-titling too, only not as severe. With "The Report", how do movie-goers develop any desire to see a film if they're not even clear on its name?
Then there's the subject matter, and in that sense, this film is like a winding path on a beach - it's dry and hard to follow. And a film about the U.S. torture scandal shouldn't be dry - now I'm not saying the topic of torture should be exciting, but at its best it's probably disturbing and maybe even unseemly. Hmm, should we go see that new superhero action film, or the political one about torture? Guess where I'll be spending my ticket money... Also, this scandal isn't even shocking any more, because there's no news being broken here, the torture of prisoners by the CIA has been firmly established, the report came out and was read into the congressional record, but that whole process took so long that it barely even made the papers. And even if people were shocked and disturbed by it, since then we've had a new president who has caused at least a hundred scandals, so by now the post-9/11 torture scandal is WAY far back in the rear-view. Immigrant kids in camps, travel bans, quid pro quo deals with the Ukraine for dirt on Hunter Biden, impeachment, shutting down the government, paying off a porn star, and then failing to respond appropriately to the pandemic in time, and that's just off the top of my head. There are probably a dozen other big scandals since 2016 that I just can't remember right now - they've all pushed the CIA torturing of prisoners out of the public's mind.
Obama bears some responsibility, too, because he refused to react to "The Report" by further penalizing the CIA, or the Cheney/Bush administration, because he feared too much that any actions against his predecessor would be perceived as partisan politics. However, a fish stinks from the head down, so as I've said before, George W. and his Boy Wonder Dick should have been officially charged with war crimes for getting us into an unjust war in the first place, and then allowing torture to happen on their watch. We all know it now, but does that really mean that there's so much water under the bridge that they can't be held accountable now? Seems like a shame.
But I think I have to curtail my comments somewhat, because between looking up information on the FBI's mishandling of the Richard Jewell/Eric Rudoph case, and then doing some Google searches to determine how much of "The Report" is fact and how much is fiction, I'm concerned about any conclusions that someone might draw from my search history. Go on, type "CIA torture scandal" into your browser's search and then suddenly you're on a watchlist somewhere, and you can never fly anywhere on vacation ever again.
That's right, we gave up a lot of personal freedoms with a thing called The USA Patriot Act (which is an acronym, and many people may not realize that - it stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and some of those "appropriate tools" including spying on American citizens to get information that could be valuable toward stopping both home-grown and foreign terrorists. So yeah, it seemed like a smart move at the time, but ordinary people ended up losing a lot of rights that they thought were guaranteed by the Constitution. So today's pandemic lesson is about keeping an eye on legislation during a time of crisis - and some of the bills recently passed to help ordinary U.S. citizens may also have been stuffed with pork-like deals for politicians and their friends. Just because they look like they're doing things to help regular people, that doesn't mean they aren't also lining their own pockets at the same time. And what did the moron-in-chief recently do? Ban all immigration to the U.S., which is something he'd been trying to do for three years, he just slapped a new justification on it, to protect the country from further infections, and he got what he wanted. But if it was wrong then, I think it's probably just as wrong now, he might be doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, that's the only difference.
There are a lot of ways the government is screwed up, and this film manages to point out a few of them - like the Senate Oversight Committee was allowed to review CIA documents for years to put their report together, but then the CIA was allowed to go through the report and redact any information they didn't like, which seems counter-productive, to say the least. Under the guise of protecting the identities of their agents, they basically were allowed to redact all pertinent information about who did what when, rendering the report unreadable and useless. The report is ABOUT them and their wrongdoing, why were they allowed the ability to edit it and redact information? That's like letting a criminal in court decide which evidence against him should be deemed inadmissible.
I didn't like the structure of the film, not at all, because it jumped around in time so much - of course, it begins near the end, as so many films do these days, with a dramatic conversation betwen Daniel T. Jones and his lawyer, then it snaps back to show him applying for a job at the White House, only to be sent away and told to get more experience working somewhere else. Instead he finds work for Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Oversight, but after that a repetitive pattern emerges - he reviews a document with some information about the "enhanced interrogation" techniques, then the film cuts back to a re-enactment of that specific torturing taking place, then jumps forward again to show Jones relaying that exact same information to Feinstein. Repeat as necessary until the end of the film, basically, but this all tends to wear thin very quickly.
You can't just say a piece of information, then show it, then repeat it again LOUDLY and DRAMATICALLY, over and over, and expect that to form any kind of coherent narrative structure. Yes, we all agree that the years of torture at secret "black sites" probably didn't generate any intelligence that the CIA didn't already have. Yes, they claimed that it did, because if it did, then the torture was legal and justified, and if it didn't, then it would have been illegal. So someone lied about the effectiveness of torture in order to cover their own ass. But we knew that already, didn't we? At some point, aren't we just waterboarding a dead horse on this issue?
Eventually, karma catches up with the CIA, and their own Inspector General found that CIA officials improperly accessed the Senate's computer systems to delete documents, and also filed improper criminal charges against Jones, so there's that. Can't we just put this all behind us now? We've all got bigger concerns, though it's sad to say.
Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Annette Bening (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Battle of Buster Scruggs"), Ted Levine (last seen in "Big Game"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Maura Tierney (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Sarah Goldberg, Lucas Dixon, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Joker"), T. Ryder Smith (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Victor Slezak (ditto), Fajer Al-Kaisi, Linda Powell (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Noah Bean (ditto), Dominic Fumusa (last seen in "13 Hours"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Dark Places"), Jennifer Morrison (last seen in "Bombshell"), John Rothman (ditto), Joanne Tucker, Ian Blackman (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Zuhdi Boueri, Carlos Gomez (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Ratnesh Dubey, Scott Shepherd (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Kate Beahan (last seen in "Flightplan"), James Hindman (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Austin Michael Young, Joseph Siravo (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Ben McKenzie (last seen in "Junebug"), Jake Silbermann, Matthew Rhys (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Guy Boyd (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Alexander Chaplin (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Sean Dugan, Pun Bandhu, Daniel London, with archive footage of Wolf Blitzer (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Dick Cheney (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), John Kerry (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Rachel Maddow (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), John McCain (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Barack Obama (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Donald Rumsfeld (last seen in "12 Strong").
RATING: 4 out of 10 destroyed videotapes
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