The Report is a political thriller based on the real-life investigation into the CIA’s use of torture following 9/11. 

Adam Driver plays Dan Jones, the Senate staffer tasked with leading the investigation, which began in 2007 and spanned six years. Annette Bening plays Diane Feinstein, the Senator from California, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 2009 to 2014, and who ordered the investigation into the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). 

The movie opens with the information that the CIA has destroyed hundreds of hours of tapes of detainee interrogations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is Jones’s job to figure out what happened to them – and what is being covered up. 

As Dan Jones begins a deep dive into millions of pages of documents, flashbacks take us back to the CIA immediately after 9/11 and the decision to start using EITs. James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith), two Air Force psychologists with no prior knowledge of prisoner interrogation, come to the CIA to propose “The Program,” and it is quickly put into effect. As Dan Jones reads about specific detainees who have been subject to The Program, flashbacks show us the gruesome techniques that have been used on these men. Once Jones’ 7,000-page report is complete, the movie moves to the political dance of getting the information to the public. 

Adam Driver is excellent as a man obsessed with the task of uncovering the proof, as is Annette Bening as a politician treading the line between re-election and doing the right thing. 

As a documentary maker who has worked on films about American foreign policy and the war in Afghanistan, I was excited to see Scott Z. Burns’s narrative treatment of the story. I believe the film would have benefitted from a more in-depth look at the atmosphere within the CIA – and U.S.A. in general – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Although there is no justifying the techniques used, nor the extensive cover-up that followed, the CIA characters are mainly portrayed as one-dimensionally inhumane. Mitchell and Jessen are portrayed with pure Machiavellian malevolence, and it is a challenge to work out what is actually driving them (the initial implication is patriotism and revenge, but the end of the film suggests it was the $80 million they received for their work). That said, overall, I found the movie compelling and engaging, a good telling of an important story.

THE REPORT (2019)

Starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm

Directed by Scott Z. Burns

Written and by Scott Z. Burns

Distributed by Amazon Studios. 120 minutes.

In Select Cinemas now. Available to stream on Amazon Prime on November 29, 2019.