Review: "The Report"

Near the beginning of "The Report," one character remarks that it's going to be very difficult to tell their story in a way people can understand. This is very much the filmmakers speaking through them to the audience, essentially warning us in advance about the complicated tale they're about to spin.

The good news is they tell this story about as well as it can be told. I'm reminded of "The Big Short," which managed to weave a complex tale with lots of moving parts into a coherent, impactful narrative.

The bad news is I fear too many people don't want to hear about the "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, employed by the U.S. government in the years after the 9/11 attacks, or the (largely successful) attempts to sweep them under the rug. It's old news.

The report the title refers to was one issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 after more than five years of careful and methodical investigation by a small team of congressional staffers. It essentially laid out its finding that the CIA abused detainees using quasi-scientific methods that were justified with out-there legal theories.

Of course, the powers that be took great pains to water down this investigation, first by refusing to allow any witnesses to be interviewed. Later they went so far as to break into the investigators' supposedly secure office in a CIA building in a move that was about two lawyerly briefs away from the Watergate plumbers.

Adam Driver shines as the hero of the story, Daniel Jones, and for once it's about a real guy and not some made-up Hollywood "amalgam" of people, like they usually do with movies like "Zero Dark Thirty." Jones actually has a scene where he sees an ad for that movie while he's working furiously to get the findings of his report published, and just about snorts.

"The Report" is basically an investigative whodunit in the mold of "All the President's Men," with distinct phases. It frames the ongoing work of the investigators between 2009 and 2014 with flashbacks to the actual events at the "black sites" operated by the CIA in 2002 and thereafter. The recreation of the EITs (many people call them torture) are truly stomach-churning.

In the first half, the main bad guys are a pair of quack-ish psychologists who first pushed the notion of EITs, which were based on actual rigorous training American military personnel undergo to prepare them for the possibility of being captured. This includes nasty techniques like stress positions, sleep deprivation, humiliation through slapping or forced nudity, and the now-infamous act of waterboarding, which simulates the feeling of drowning.

Played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith, the psychologists are portrayed as cowboy amateurs, overruling experienced FBI interrogators who know how to build rapport with a subject. Instead they construct their own waterboarding table based on one they saw in a video.

Watching these detainees, evil men though they were, being so foully mistreated is gripping stuff and propels the first act of the film.

The middle section wanders a bit, as we get further away from the torture in both time and narrative, and the movie turns from the story of an investigation to the attempts to have the report made public. At one point the CIA starts investigating the people investigating them. (Yes, it really happened.)

There are surreptitious meetings with a New York Times reporter, classified documents being smuggled out of buildings, and other familiar clandestine stuff.

Annette Bening gives a strong turn as Sen. Diane Feinstein, the chair of the intelligence committee and Jones' boss. She is portrayed as diligent, un-partisan and persevering while recognizing the limitations of playing by the rules of Washington D.C., where bureaucratic processes take months, or years.

She often has to rein Jones in or yank his leash. It's interesting how their character arcs diverge. At the start, he is methodical and calm while she rages about uncovering the truth, and by the end their roles have reversed. He's hollering about the injustice of it all and she has to coldly read the facts and make the hard calls.

Aside from these two figures, this is a movie where just about everybody comes off looking bad. It is thoroughly bipartisan in its contempt -- first for the Bush administration that set EITs in motion, and later for an Obama White House that was so determined not to dwell on the past that it ended up being complicit in the cover-up.

Obama CIA director John Brennan (Ted Levine, who can scowl with the best of them), a man much in the news these days for other reasons, comes across as the main heavy in the second half of the movie as the spooks push back and try to deep-six the report.

Scott Z. Burns, a veteran screenwriter, wrote the script and directs his first feature film. It's a strong showing, taking all these different pieces and assembling them into a final puzzle. The excellent supporting cast includes Jon Hamm, Michael C. Hall, Maura Tierney, Corey Stoll, John Rothman, Scott Shepherd and Tim Blake Nelson.

Burns frequently adorns the background with honeycomb patterns or other repeating geometric shapes, like the CIA building where Jones departs from late every evening. It gives us the sense of being trapped in a beehive pervaded by a loud, droning buzz of groupthink.

Whatever your thoughts on the efficacy of enhanced interrogation, it's disturbing to think how our government undertakes execrable practices and then spend years trying to hide that fact from the public. "The Report" is a complex but worthy deep-dive into the abyss we'd rather not gaze at too long.

Review: "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"

How do you portray a person whose most notable attribute was remaining an enigma?

That’s the challenge facing the long-gestating cinematic portrayal of Mark Felt, the FBI lifer who was eventually revealed to be “Deep Throat,” a key source to the Washington Post stories on Watergate by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which more than anything else helped end the cancerous presidency of Richard Nixon.

For writer/director Peter Landesman (“Concussion”), the answer is you cast a powerhouse actor in the lead role, show the Watergate saga from the perspective of the government investigators, present a dizzying gallery of players inside and outside the FBI, and hope for the best.

The result, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” is a noble effort that doesn’t quite sing. The film ends up getting caught in the minutia of the investigation, rather than exploring the moral quandary of Washington’s rot, and why a loyal company man like Felt was compelled to speak up (if not out).

Liam Neeson, decked out in a snowy hairpiece and ‘70s executive suits, manages to resemble Felt a wee bit. He’s obviously practiced the real man’s stiff, formal speaking cadence -- though this was maybe a time when it might have been wiser to personify rather than impersonate a historical figure.

(For a contrasting example, see Chadwick Boseman’s brash take on Thurgood Marshall in “Marshall.”)

As the story opens in 1972, Nixon seems to be riding a wave to easy reelection when the Watergate break-in and arrests occur. Almost right away, Felt, the number two man at the FBI, understands the potential for the scandal to go right to the top of the White House hierarchy. He gears up his forces to investigate the crime without fear or favor to any potential consequences.

But then FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover dies after five decades at the top. Felt would seem to be the natural choice to take the director’s chair, but White House flunky L. Patrick Gray is tapped instead. Gray is played by Marton Csokas, who practically seems to drip oily servility. In short order, Felt is instructed to wrap up the Watergate investigation toot suite, and is told who he can and cannot interview.

Felt starts dropping clues for journalists to pick up the thread, including Sandy Smith (Bruce Greenwood) at Time magazine and Woodward (Julian Morris). As his frustration grows, so does the level of detail in his leaks. Soon, on top of the Watergate investigation Felt is charged with discovering the leaker.

Felt eventually outed himself as Deep Throat in 2005, when ill health and the encouragement of his family nudged him to seek a book deal. (Upon which this film is partially based.) Many people had speculated over the years that Felt may have been the Post source, with the shorthand justification being that he was an ambitious man who felt snubbed at not getting the top job.

The film takes a more nuanced approach, suggesting that Felt was less offended over his own status than the injurious tactics the Nixon administration employed against a government agency whose mission he held sacred. On several occasions he brazenly tells White House power brokers, such as chief counsel John Dean (Michael C. Hall), that they have no authority over the FBI, which he declares a completely autonomous agency.

Given today’s political contretemps, such an assertion seems comedically archaic.

An important subplot to the tale, which isn’t well known, is that Felt’s own daughter, Joan, had disappeared during this time. He and his wife, Audrey (Diane Lane), searched desperately for her, fearing she may have thrown in with the Weather Underground, a radical group that he himself had been investigating.

Just how good was Mark Felt at keeping a secret? Let’s put it this way: when he was later put on trial for violating the civil rights of Weather Underground associates -- and convicted, then pardoned -- one of the people who donated to Felt’s legal fund was Richard Nixon.

That sounds like the sort of guy whose head you’d like to get inside. Alas, while “Mark Felt” is an interesting exploration of Watergate’s flip side, the man in the middle remains a riddle.