Magic Marker Cover-up – Splice Today

Along with gaudy rock operas, space operas, and superhero spectacles, well be deluged by movies ripped from the headlines whether they end up on Netflix or in theaters worldwide. Ever since Spotlight won the Best Picture Oscar in 2016, the same year The Big Short was expected to win, theres been a surge of these films about relatively recent real world events. I love it: Politics is show business for ugly people is a clich for a reason. Depending on the perspective of the script, these films can be entertaining, at least more entertaining than the news itself, which has never resembled ESPN or WWE more. Now these movies come non-stop: Just last month was Steven Soderberghs The Laundromat, last Christmas was Vice, this Christmas its Bombshell, a couple of months ago was Official Secrets, and then theres the stream of documentaries that will continue throughout the Trump presidency.

Scott Z. Burns The Report isnt propaganda, and its not infected by myopic Trump hysteria. Its a serviceable run-through of a story that most Americans tuned out for a number of reasons: a weary media, thousands of mostly redacted pages, and unbelievably horrific war crimes committed by Americans that not only violated the Geneva Convention but produced no useful intel after six years. Dan Jones is not infamous or in hiding like Edward Snowden or Julian Assangehe was never a whistleblower, and toward the end of The Report his avatar Adam Driver is given a chance by some wannabe Deep Throat to leak the full, un-redacted report on CIA enhanced interrogation techniques. He refuses: If its going to come out, its going to come out the right way. And indeed it did, albeit in summary form and still heavily redacted, in December 2014. Ive had a copy sitting on my shelf since then, but have never gone beyond skimming because its an abyss.

Society is based on a shared murder, croaks Jean-Luc Godard in this years The Image Book, the most comprehensive and concise examination and diagnosis of the failures of the 20th century and the hopelessness heading into the 21st. Its like a bad dream written in a stormy night. This says more than any third act speech or moralizing Oscar bait ever will. But The Report isnt bad, isnt bait, and even includes Zero Dark Thirty in its critique. Consumed by the investigation for years, Jones looks up one day to see a commercial for Kathryn Bigelows film, a reprehensible piece of propaganda on the order of Triumph of the Will and The Birth of a Nation, and by far the worst film Ive ever seen. Jones knew in late-2012 that what the movie was saying was false and he couldnt do anything about it. Bigelow put herself in league with Riefenstahl by making a movie that endorsed our governments lies about torture eventually leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The Report deserves credit not for exemplary filmmaking but honest portrayal of American war crimes and an attempted cover-up (who knows how much wasnt released). Made for Netflix, its a politically sound, albeit dry, dramatization of the CIAs torture program, and the report itself is equally boring and revolting. The movie is the same: Adam Driver is reliably good, as is Annette Bening as Dianne Feinstein (though I kept thinking of Elizabeth Warren watching herthat performance is inevitable). Many great character actors and people pulled from television that keep it briskamong them: Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll, Tim Blake Nelson (the compromised Vice President in Angel Has Fallen), Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Morrison. Its too long at two hours, and the sepia-toned flashbacks to CIA black sites with brutal dramatizations of these atrocities we sponsored: water-boarding, sleep deprivation, walling (take a wild guess), mock burials with insects. A suggestion is almost always better than this, or more dense sequences that depict or evoke the torture without having to, ironically, sit through what at times felt like a rehash of that violent object Zero Dark Thirty.

But Burns direction and script are otherwise taut and most importantly do justice to a very delicate subject thats been botched and abominated too many times now. Hes written some really good American social satires for Soderbergh: Side Effects, The Informant!, Contagion, and this years The Laundromat, a mixed bag and another Netflix movie. Im glad The Report is going out to two million Netflix subscribers and a handful of theaters. This isnt a great movie, but if you have the chance, and youre interested or want to know more about American war crimes in the 21st century, see it in a theater. Netflix, at the very least, doesnt skimpthey put money into their movies.

Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith

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Magic Marker Cover-up - Splice Today