The Report (2019)

Scott Z. Burns has made a film about paperwork, and he has made it with a straight face. The Report follows Daniel Jones, a Senate staffer who spent years reading six million pages of CIA material so that a 6,700-page summary might eventually be read aloud into a microphone. There are no car chases. There are fluorescent lights, redactions, and a man with a lanyard explaining that the intelligence obtained through torture was obtained some other way. It is a film about the machinery of accountability, and it regards that machinery as sacred.

On the matter of modern social consciousness, the film is a desert. The cast is drawn from the historical record and stays there. Women hold real power (Annette Bening's Feinstein runs the committee), but the film has no interest in patriarchy as a subject, only in oversight. The Arab men at the center of the abuses are victims of state violence, not vehicles for a racial argument, and the film never turns them into one. There is no romance, no identity, no environmental lament, no critique of markets. The villains are bureaucrats and contractors, which is a different species of villain entirely.

The film does lecture. It lectures about torture, about the lie that torture works, about a government that buried its own findings and promoted the people who wrote them. That is a sermon, delivered with a furrowed brow, and it lands with the weight of a gavel. It is the kind of preaching that predates the current fashion, aimed at a citizen rather than a demographic. We are left with a sober, well-made, occasionally exhausting film that believes in institutions right up until it doesn't. The report is released. No one is charged. The credits roll. We classify it accordingly.