THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 85
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
ers sit and play softly at a piano. Pause.
Then he hammers down on the low
notes, in one big boom, as if to vent a
frustration at which we can only guess.
His wisdom feels hard won, and his de
cency hedged with doubts. (His sole
rival in this respect, perhaps, is Charles M.
Schulz.) What we have here, in other
words, is the longawaited antidote to
“Forrest Gump” (1994)—a huge hit from
which, despite being an ardent Hanks
ian, I still flinch. That movie sanctifies
ignorance, whereas Heller’s, equally gen
tle, explores not simplemindedness so
much as simplicity, a rarer gift. As Lloyd
says of Mr. Rogers, “I just don’t know
if he’s for real.” Strange to say, he is.
I
f you had never heard of the United
States, and saw a double bill of “A
Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”
and Scott Z. Burns’s new movie, “The
Report,” what would you make of this
unfamiliar land? On the one hand, it
features acts of thoughtful kindness
performed by men in leisurewear; on
the other hand, it is a bleak zone, where
acts of calculated malice are funded by
taxpayers, investigated, and, in the mind
of the nation, consigned to nearobliv
ion. The two films might as well take
place on different planets. What’s so
united about that?
The title of Burns’s movie refers to
a study of the C.I.A.’s Detention and
Interrogation Program that was com
missioned by the Senate Intelligence
Committee. In short, the highups
wanted to take a look at weird shit. The
final document, running to sixtyseven
hundred pages, has never been made
public, but a director’s cut of five hun
dred and twentyeight pages was re
leased five years ago. Dianne Feinstein,
who chaired the committee from 2009
to 2015, is played by Annette Bening,
with perfect pitch; any instinctive lib
eral alarm, you sense, has to be calmed
and schooled by the demands of sena
torial Realpolitik. Bening sets the tone
for the whole movie, which is heavy on
procedure and seeks your undivided at
tention. Bathroom breaks are verboten.
Sit up, cross your legs, and watch.
The upright citizen—or, viewed
from another angle, the beleaguered
schmuck—in charge of producing the
report is a staffer named Dan Jones
(Adam Driver). We learn almost noth
ing about Dan’s life outside the job, for
two reasons. One, because Burns wants
no lull or letup in the central drama.
And, two, because, if Dan’s mission re
ally is the demoralizing and coffeedriven
grind that it appears to be, he has no life
elsewhere. He says that he prefers to
work “behind the scenes,” and his wish
is grimly granted. Month after month,
he and other researchers perch in a base
ment chamber, under grayishblue light,
and stare at screens. At the start, they
don’t even have a printer. I’ve known
fridges where more is going on.
Yet “The Report” has purpose and
grip, as does any film that carries the
stamp of Adam Driver. He’s tall, but
his gait is too pigeontoed to be a stride.
(The same was true, oddly enough, of
John Wayne.) And his face, though long
and carved, is anything but impassive.
When Dan, deep in his Sisyphean task,
finds the weight of his conscience un
endurable, he takes appropriate action
and winds up needing a lawyer. Or so
he believes. “You don’t have a legal prob
lem,” the lawyer tells him. “You have a
sunlight problem.” I tried to summon
an image of Dan on a beach, sipping a
Daiquiri and oiling his chalky skin, but
nothing came.
To be fair, there are kinetic sights in
Burns’s film; what’s peculiar is that they
exert less dramatic pressure than the
supposedly boring ones. In flashback,
we meet a couple of goons, played with
seamy persuasion by T. Ryder Smith
and Douglas Hodge, who call them
selves psychologists and are hired by
the C.I.A. to make life hell—a repeti
tive hell—for various suspects in the
war on terror. Brace yourself for water
boarding and other tools of torture,
wielded in grainy gloom.
Convincingly nasty though such se
quences are, I’m not convinced that we
need them. “The Report” is most galling
when it portrays the bureaucracy of the
inhumane, and what has stayed with me
are the briefings in which the goons, with
a smear of pride, announce their meth
ods and aims. We hear of “Walling,” “Use
of Insects,” and “Mock Burials.” Of the
three stages in a prisoner’s submission:
“Debility. Dependency. Dread.” And of
the desired end: “Learned Helplessness.”
The language crawls with cruelty. A ma
ture democracy, in short, is not defeating
its enemies—some of whom may have
been wrongly identified—with courage
or guile but turning them back into in
fants. No wonder the eventual report is
so heftily redacted; Dan’s hard labor is
made to seem like an exercise in futility,
as entire pages are reduced to thick stripes
of black. When the shame becomes too
much to admit, block it out.
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