Con’s Score: 3.5 Bottles of water
Isn’t Adam Driver running hot right now, which is good because he’s a talented actor, who deserves more than strong support roles. It’s always interesting to see if he could make the transit to a lead role, without a light sabre in his hands.
Driver plays Daniel J Jones, an investigator who looked into the CIA’s interrogation methods following 9/11. He’s set on the trail by Senator Feinstein (Annette Benning) who is battling the White House represented by Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough (Johnathan Hamm).
It’s almost comical, as the tale unfolds of how these enhanced interrogation techniques – more commonly known as torture – came to be part of the CIA’s playbook. How they bought into it is incredibly stupid and simplistic. A couple of clowns, who were pretty limited as psychologists, explained the FBI’s techniques were limited and theirs – using the three D’s – debilitate, demean and deny – would be more effective. The CIA bought it for $80 million.
It becomes pretty graphic as we’re shown how waterboarding works (even though it doesn’t). Much is hard to watch, which is another problem this film has. Narratively, it’s pretty tedious.
Writer-director Scott Z Burns must have read the 7,000 page report because he’s pretty faithful to the facts and events. But committee meetings and slabs of exposition don’t make for great drama. (It reminded me of a Simpsons send-up of a Star Wars prequel that was a galactic congress roll call.) When the final stirring scenes are a John McCain speech, you know you have a problem sustaining the drama.
What does drive this is Driver’s passionate performance and Benning’s dry delivery. He plays the obsessive Jones well and milks what he can from the script. Jones is facing goal at the beginning of the film, but the tension isn’t tight enough. Benning is restrained but as good as always. There’s also a solid cast of TV actors like Michael C Hall and Maura Tierney.
It is still an important film for the US to see and understand how dangerous and inept Cheney and the CIA was. Jones explains that one of the informants they fobbed off ended up being one of the pilots who flew a plane into Capital Hill. Apparently he wanted money… a princely sum of $2,000. And at the time, their intelligence told them a hit was coming. How history could have been so different, if not for the folly of foolish CIA men and women.
Burns has produced a sturdy film, using hand held cameras, grainy yellow/sepia exposures for the flashbacks, and blue tones for the present. He breaks up the linear timeline to keep it interesting. It’s a fascinating script, but not one that is as devastating as the results of the CIA’s torture techniques and the way they let America down. Political pundits will lap this up.
Con Nats, On The Screen
