'The Report'

While the news channels are riveted by one kind of presidential scandal, writer-director Scott Z. Burns’ procedural drama “The Report” takes us back to the good old days when presidents did things like authorize torture of detainees under the guise of fighting terrorism.

The story begins in 2009, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, reads in The New York Times that CIA agents destroyed videotapes of waterboarding procedures. “I want to know what’s on those tapes,” Feinstein tells one of her staffers, Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), and tells him to start digging into it. Soon, Jones is told to expand his investigation to a broader look at the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices.

Jones is given a room in the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., with a separate computer server and as much access to documents as the CIA will allow. When he first enters the room, he notices there’s no printer or paper. “Paper has a way of getting people in trouble at our place,” his CIA minder tells him. Jones replies, “At our place, paper’s how we keep track of laws.”

Burns, who wrote Steven Soderbergh’s sprawling but concise global outbreak thriller “Contagion,” feeds the audience a lot of information, and makes it quick, understandable and devastating. 

Burns details how, after 9/11 and the panic that ensued, a pair of contract psychologists, James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith), sold the CIA on a scientifically shoddy program of humiliation and physical duress to try to break down detainees’ reticence to talk. The program, which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and putting detainees in stress positions, was given the bureaucratically banal name of “enhanced interrogation techniques” or EIT.

What Jones discovered was that EIT was more likely to produce bad information than good, and tainted any chance of trying detainees in American courts. A prime example of EIT done to ridiculous amounts was the supposed terrorism mastermind Khaled Sheikh Muhammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. As Feinstein asks Jones, “If it’s so effective, why do they have to do it 183 times?”

Compiling the information for the report — which ultimately grew to 6,700 pages — was one part of the battle. The other was getting it, or even an executive summary of the report, released to the public.

Burns assembles an impressive ensemble cast to tell the story of this investigation. Besides Bening’s rock-solid Feinstein, the cast includes Maura Tierney as a CIA official overseeing the EIT program, Tim Blake Nelson as a CIA whistleblower, Ted Levine as incoming CIA director John Brennan, and Jon Hamm as an Obama administration official who tries to minimize the damage the report’s release could cause.

At the center, standing like a very tall beacon of truth, is Driver, who calmly digs through the documents, analyzes what they mean, confronts moral quandaries on all sides, and tamps down his righteous fury when he discovers how badly the CIA behaved. Driver gives Jones — who is a real person, not a composite character created by Burns for narrative expediency — the indignation that any of us should feel at learning how much abhorrent, damaging and illegal behavior was done in the name of the American people.

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‘The Report’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 15, at select theaters, including Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for some scenes of inhumane treatment and torture, and for language. Running time: 119 minutes.