The Report is Unevenly Paced but Interesting Enough
The first act of The Report is an absolute editing nightmare, but it’s supposed to set-up what’s to come. The Report tells the true story of Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver) who leads an investigation after the CIA destroyed tapes that showed their “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”, post 9/11. Jones reports to Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) and discovers that the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” never once worked. Jones tries to publish The Report, but the CIA is doing everything in their power for it never to be released.
The most surprising aspect about The Report’s first act is its lack of engagement from the audience members and the filmmakers. Its ever-changing time-periods make for a very fragmented narrative, but there is never a real justification to keep going back and forth from 2007 to 2002, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2014, 2003, and so on and so forth. If you cut the scenes in which you see the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in action, you would lose about 20 minutes of the movie. Those 20 minutes are wholly unnecessary, with characters who serve no purpose to the movie. Tim Blake Nelson plays the “guy that thinks what the CIA is doing is not O.K. but doesn’t have any jurisdiction to intervene” and does nothing else, Douglas Hodge plays the “dude that tortures alleged terrorists” alongisde T. Ryder Smith. All of these actors should’ve been cut from the movie, as they serve absolutely no purpose to the story and only stretch the runtime. The Report likes to play with monstration and narration (as the great André Gaudreault puts it), in which a character tells about a torture method, and then we see exactly what the person tells us by SHOWING the torture method. If we removed every moment of SHOWING and only kept the TELLING, we would save so much time of unnecessary fluff. The first act is full of unnecessary fluff and A-List actors doing nothing, like Michael C. Hall and Jon Hamm. Both have great screen-presence, but their characters serve no purpose to the story and/or they do NOTHING.
Annette Bening was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Dianne Feinstein. While her performance is quite good, she doesn’t measure-up to the quality of Adam Driver’s acting, a superb performance from all cylinders. Every time Driver is on-screen, your eyes are solely focused on him and him only. The scenes in which he bashes the CIA for their insubordinance and corrupt behavior are all fantastic, he perfectly encapsulates the obsessive nature of Daniel J. Jones’ work, someone who doesn’t want to quit and won’t go down without a fight even if everyone is trying to silence him for trying to release the report. This is where the movie really picks up steam, in the 2nd and 3rd act, which contains a better narrative that is less fragmented and focuses on Daniel J. Jones’ journey of releasing The Torture Report to the public and the court battle that ensues. This is where The Report goes from bad to interesting enough, and picks up a lot of momentum. You become riveted by the fast-paced political mumbo-jumbo dialogue of Scott Z. Burns’ writing (good luck trying to understand if you don’t follow one iota of U.S. Politics) and Adam Driver’s lead performance. What the third act does brilliantly is point out the flaws of Obama’s so-called “post-partisan” presidency. I was never a fan of Barack Obama’s fake-progressive politics (though I’ll take him instead of Justin Trudeau any day, trust me. Obama is far more charismatic and less of a smug asshole like Trudeau), and The Report isn’t afraid to point out how corrupt the CIA were in influencing Obama’s decisions as he campaigned on transpartisanship and CHANGE for everyone. Obama hypocrisy exposed in a brilliant fashion.
The Report doesn’t break any new ground in terms of cinema, but as a political thriller, it becomes highly interesting in the film’s second and third act, after a completely disjointed and jumbled first. Adam Driver leads an impressive cast of A-Listers who can barely top his terrific performance. Driver is the man of the hour, delivering one of the best and most exciting performances of his career. If only the movie was at that same calibre as Driver’s performance. Oh well!
✯✯✯½
