In The Report, Adam Driver is dedicated to revealing the truth of America’s torturous behaviour during the War on Terror, says Dan Slevin.
Photo: Amazon
It’s Adam Driver month in cinemas an online. His duet with Scarlett Johansson, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, premiered on Netflix this weekend and his final* turn as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker lands in cinemas next Thursday.
In between, a smaller but – in this reviewer’s opinion – no less important movie has arrived on Amazon Prime. The Report is in the genre that you might call ‘recent history explained’ – how the US government got itself into quite a pickle over ‘enhanced interrogations’ (aka torture) and how the story eventually found its way into the public domain.
Driver plays Dan Jones – yay for a hero named Dan! – a former intelligence analyst who now works as a staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening). It is the early days of the Obama presidency and Feinstein leads the Senate Intelligence Committee concerned with American conduct during the so-called War on Terror.
Annette Bening as Dianne Feinstein and Adam Driver as Dan Jones in The Report from Amazon Prime. Photo: Amazon
The politics of this investigation is tortuous in its own right. Funding and support is offered and then withdrawn and eventually Jones is left with a tiny team of dedicated investigators in a tiny room in the basement of CIA headquarters, reviewing over 6 million pieces of documentation. It’s a Sisyphean task, not helped by the fact that every new revelation leads to an increasingly depressive conclusion – after 9/11 America basically lost its collective mind.
The Report is written and directed by Scott Z. Burns – a screenwriter primarily and regular collaborator with Steven Soderbergh who is a producer here – and it manages to avoid the stylistic excesses of films like Adam McKay’s Vice and The Big Short which also attempted to explain complex recent history in cinematic form.
Photo: Amazon
Burns is supported by Driver’s idealistic everyman and a raft of high-profile supporting performers. You’ll be familiar with most of these faces even if it takes you the extent of the few scenes in which they appear before you recognise them: Michael C. Hall, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, Jon Hamm and Douglas Hodge.
I’m pretty sure it’s impossible not to be outraged by the story told in The Report – and everyone who thinks that they won’t be should test themselves by checking it out – and it’s a terrific example of a moderately budgeted intelligent film for grown-up audiences that are hard to find in cinemas these days.
The Report is streaming now for Amazon Prime Video subscribers.
*Final? Who knows, this is Disney, after all.
