Adam Driver stars as the real-life researcher who struggled to publish his study of ‘extreme interrogation techniques’ in this cool, dry look at the facts
Scott Z Burns is the writer-producer who in collaboration with Steven Soderbergh has helped create a number of quirky films on conspiracist-paranoid themes, most recently the scattershot satire The Laundromat. Now he makes his feature directing debut with a more sober, downbeat and valuable docudrama about US
Senate researcher Daniel J Jones and his decade-long battle to publish the gigantic report he’d written on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of “extreme interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding), a report impeded at every step by the agency and the
White House itself.
The film does a good job at showing how the right succeeded in framing the debate in terms of wussy-liberals-are-squeamish-but-torture-gets-answers. The point of Jones’s report is that torture did not get answers. This not a Watergate-type tale of journalist-heroism; the person risking jail and meeting shadowy informants in underground carparks is Jones himself, played by Adam Driver with a cool, calm deliberation, although sometimes Driver is a little too impassive. People will occasionally say to him: “You look tired …” Does he?