Tag Archives: All the President’s Men

The Report on ‘Enhanced Interrogation’


(AP)

Let’s get confirmation biases out of the way straight off: The Report is a political southpaw of a film. But it clearly worked meticulously on the pitch.

Of all the statistics involving the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s post–9/11 detention and interrogation program — better known as the “Torture Report” — let’s focus on this for a second: It had 38,000 footnotes.

This mammoth piece of work, which ran 6,700 pages and took years of toil by Senate staffer Daniel L. Jones, examining millions of classified documents in a windowless basement, was never fully released; only a 525–page summary was published, in 2014. Well, now it’s getting its own Hollywood film, at least. It seems only fair, in a cosmic sense.

It should go without saying that it’s a challenge to produce exciting cinema from a dense document like a Senate report. Unlike, say, classic films about investigative journalism, there’s no grizzled editor yelling out: “Stop the presses!” (Whether anyone has ever actually yelled that in real life remains unclear, but it’s great in the movies.)

Still, The Report, written and directed with brisk efficiency and a clear sense of outrage by Scott Z. Burns, does its level best to make us understand the importance of this document, which at once revealed the extent of CIA “enhanced interrogation” in the wake of 9/11 and showed that it didn’t work — discrediting, along the way, the idea that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. And yes, the film takes more intellectual energy and patience from the viewer than most. And that’s fine. It deserves the effort.

In that regard, The Report (the missing word “Torture” is cleverly “redacted” in the film’s graphics) should be greatly helped by the fact that it happens to star one of the most popular actors in Hollywood.

Does it suddenly seem like Adam Driver is in everything? Already, Oscar predictions are circulating for his performance in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, an intimate meditation on divorce. Soon, he reprises his role as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. He also scorched the Broadway stage earlier this year in Burn This, earning a Tony nod.

All those roles presented radically different challenges than Driver’s task here. This is the story of a report, not a man. No attempt is made to explore Jones’ psyche. We never see him at home, with family or with friends. We barely even see him outside.

Still, with a controlled intensity that gradually increases, Driver makes it work. His partner here is a terrific Annette Bening as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, his boss. Only an actress as precise and restrained as Bening could capture the no–nonsense persona of Feinstein, the California Democrat who assigned Jones the report, without ever seeming to imitate her — although the coiffed hair and the glasses are pretty on–point.

The real “action” in this film occurs in flashback, with nausea–inducing scenes of terror techniques used on detainees at black sites, or secret CIA prisons. These techniques — developed by two psychologists, contractors who were given millions of dollars and huge latitude — include sleep deprivation, forced nudity, so–called “rectal rehydration,” and mock burials in coffins, sometimes filled with insects.

They also include waterboarding, the technique of simulated drowning that one secret informant who approaches Jones — a physician’s aide — tells him came pretty close to the actual thing. We also see detainees stripped and chained to floors. One of them dies, after having freezing water poured onto him. Driver, as Jones, rails: “They (expletive) killed a guy, and nobody was held accountable?”

It’s important to note here that many will see The Report as a cinematic rebuttal, seven years later, to Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar–nominated film that implied a connection between CIA torture and intelligence that led to the bin Laden raid. They will certainly not miss the brief but pointed reference to that movie, a quick mention from a TV screen that provides the film with its slight levity. Image result for zero dark thirty

The Report is not nearly as action–packed as Zero Dark Thirty, and it doesn’t even have the dark–garage scenes like those with Deep Throat in All the President’s Men — except one quick exchange with an informant. Image result for all the presidents men deep throat

But the issues it addresses are, to say the least, crucial ones, and even though it trusts its audience to soldier through some dense material, the audience should repay that trust. Here’s hoping it will.

All the News That Fits, We Print

 

I have been a police reporter for 15 years, and a film reporter for another decade.

So I feel comfortable committing the following double heresy:

All the President’s Men is a lousy movie.

As a book, it’s poetry. As a story, it’s the gold standard for every aspiring reporter.

But, strictly from an entertainment perspective, the 1976 Oscar winner for Best Picture — and five other Academy Awards —  cinematically sucks.

I realized this last month, when HBO — perhaps in a plea for substantial political journalism — made it one of their feature films for the week spanning Election Day.

At least a dozen times, the movie has unspooled before me. I know the story, the characters and the circumstances inside out. I even recognized the lobby, newsroom and parking lot, as The Washington Post was my old employer, Bob Woodward my Sunday editor.

So on my most recent viewing, I decided to watch again. This time with intensified focus. Even played it with closed captioning, to absorb the nuance of the script.

No matter. It still blows.

For one, there are simply too many characters to follow. Just try keeping up with the names of more than three dozen actors with screen credits, from political wonks to Post editors. Unless you’re a journalism major in college, you likely don’t know the name Harry Rosenfeld (He was the Post’s city editor an a key figure in the scandal.). By the second hour, you need a score card and flow chart to keep track of the characters.

Second: we never meet the mysterious character behind the film, Deep Throat. The real life character, Robert Felt, was only identified posthumously.

Now imagine trying this strategy in any other film. Consider the pitch:
Producer: “So we’ve got this shadowy figure, who only meets Robert Redford in darkened garages after secretly signaling him he has found new evidence.”
Exec: “I love it. Who does it turn out to be?
Producer: “We don’t know, so we never reveal.”
Exec: “The door is that way.”

Or another scene, in which Carl Bernstein confirms his story with a source over the phone.
Producer: “It’s even got a 10-second countdown. Or count-up — the reporter is counting to ten.”
Exec: “Beautiful. What happens at 10?”
Producer: “Nothing. He confirms the story by not hanging up.”
Click

One thing it does get right: the acrobatics required to handle a telephone while trying to write down what people say. How many collective hours, I wonder, were wasted in old films of characters dialing a rotary phone?

phones

It’s easy to see why APM was an unmitigated success. For the public, it was a reminder of what a healthy press looks like in action. And they could drool over Redford.

For critics, Alan Paluka’s drama took painstaking measures to get the details right, and it did (however stultifying those details were). Good films raise the art of its subject matter.

And who in the mainstream press was going to knock it? Sure, the meetings between Deep Throat and Woodward were pure fiction. But when’s the last time reporters were portrayed by acting icons? Hollywood characterizations of reporters is typically  negative when the journalist is a minor character. But positive when they are central characters.

Finally (spoiler alert): the finale. APM concludes with no arrest, no showdown of powers. Simply a teletype, clacking the news that Richard Nixon resigned from office. Roll credits.

It was a wholly appropriate finale, one that perhaps was as spot-on as any based-on-a-true-story premise.

But ending a narrative with a few lines of text rarely makes for compelling drama.

See?