The Report

I am a huge fan of Adam Driver (I find him to be strangely appealing) so I was very eager to see the political thriller The Report at Sundance this year.  I wasn't able to get a ticket but I knew that it would eventually come to the Broadway.  I saw it yesterday and I found it to be incredibly compelling and disturbing.  Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and she asks Daniel Jones (Driver), a member of her staff, to investigate reports of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on detainees after the 9/11 attacks.  He spends the next five years obsessively studying over 6 million pages of documents from the CIA and determines that the torture of terror suspects yielded nothing that the CIA didn't know already.  His 6,700 page report is blocked by CIA director John Brennan (Ted Levine) who vehemently disagrees with his interpretation of events and by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm) who says that Obama wants to be perceived as a non-partisan president and doesn't want to go after Bush and his policies.  What is eventually released is a 525 page executive summary that is heavily redacted and does not result in any disciplinary measures against the CIA.  This movie is sometimes really difficult to watch because it includes many flashbacks of detainees being tortured (the waterboarding sequences are especially brutal) as Jones uncovers information.  This movie reminds me a lot of All the President's Men and Spotlight because, as with both of these movies, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the next revelation and was horrified when it came. Driver gives a riveting performance as a naive and idealistic staffer (he takes a picture of the Capitol Building on his first day in Washington) who becomes more and more jaded as he becomes emotionally invested in his investigation.  I especially loved the intensity of his scenes with Bening who is pitch-perfect as Feinstein.  I highly recommend this movie because it shines a light on a troubling period in our history that should not be forgotten.