Stepping up from shorts & streaming series to features, writer/director Scott Z. Burns can’t entirely avoid the stink of importance in this telling of a lonely man’s quest to bring post-9/11 C.I.A. torture techniques (‘Enhanced Interrogation’) to light, but the film rewards tolerance & patience, quite effective in using the style of a 1970s paranoid political thriller* to carry its theme & revelations to resolution. (Though with but a token theatrical release, who knows how many people saw it.) Adam Driver, looking as anonymous as possible, is Daniel Jones, a D.C. political aide in the early 2000s tagged by Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) to lead a task force sifting thru huge volumes of documents that wind up showing how many rules were broken (national & international); how useless the collected ‘information’ was; and how the C.I.A. worked in & out of official circles to cover up ‘patriotic’ incompetence. Very well cast (Jon Hamm, Obama’s Sec. Of Veteran Affairs, exceptional), the film’s main power comes thru careful structuring of some hard to parse dramatic road blocks (the film not completely free of showing one-step-forward-two-steps-back frustration without itself becoming frustrating!), but also gaining real power thru its use of art design (gray walls, concrete-cube basement rooms, florescent lighting, and exteriors of post-modern brutalist architecture) to paint a portrait of D.C., its lever-pullers and maze of incestuous power-blocking participants. (Note: Our Family Friendly label aimed at older teens; think of it as a Civics Lesson.)
DOUBLE-BILL: *Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN/’76 probably the main influence.
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