Much like how Steven Soderbergh couldn’t restrain himself to
a single film this year, his frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns appears to be
in the same mode as, along with writing Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, he has
stepped back into the director’s chair to do some even more scouring of
conspiratorial secrets, this time involving the United States government and
their involvement in torturing suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11. Strap
yourself in for some pretty ugly ruminations because, much like the film
itself, I’m not going to be holding anything back.
This might be one of the ugliest experiences of nostalgia
I’ve ever experienced in response to a film, both for what it pertains to in
the past and what it reflects in the present. At a time when it feels like
politicians have completely given up on the euphemistic pretence behind what
they tell the public, it’s quite surreal to see a film so wrapped up in
hair-splitting and enough legal gymnastics to make heads spin. Burns’ scripting
lays it all bare in regards to what these private contractors were doing,
utilising ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (again, it’s sad when you miss
the days when pols at least pretended to care what the public thinks)
that were unreliable, on people who would say anything for the literal heavy
metal torture to stop, all under the guise of protecting the people.
How a society treats the worst of its enemies says just as
much about cultural priorities as how it treats the best of its heroes. The
line between the two blurs a little when it sets in the levels of loyalty
protection people will offer those they ‘agree with’, but in terms of combating
terrorism, it has always been treated as a necessary evil. I’ll forgo a lengthy
rant about how much I hate that term that truly puts the ‘moron’ in ‘oxymoron’,
and instead leave it at how it serves as just another example of just how
fucked-up the cross-section of American and Middle Eastern activity has become.
In plain terms, this is basically the government torturing
people to help get unreliable intel on attacks carried out by terrorist
factions and guerrilla groups that, over the course of the two nations’
relationship, the U.S. themselves have helped fund and arm. The involvement of
the U.S. military in coups and the creation of power vacuums continue to bite
them in the arse, and through this film’s own lens, it really made me question
if these people genuinely thought such actions were going to solve the problem…
or if they just wanted to satiate their own bloodlust in a way that would keep
them protected.
That notion of what these actions say about the people who
commit or even witness them plays into a lot of the more personal aspects of
the story, which thankfully keeps this from just being a series of bullet
points regarding the titular Report. Through Adam Driver’s Daniel Jones and his
team who carry out the investigations to create the Report, we see how damaging
this kind of work is. It can’t be healthy to be spending all day reading
through detailed recounts of people claiming to be out for your own best
interests carrying out atrocities that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Then there’s the well-placed cultural touchstones, like the
contemporaneous release of Zero Dark Thirty, a thriller about the capture of
Osama Bin Laden that serves as a central touching point for the people who defend
the EITs (‘we wouldn’t have caught Osama without them’, basically), or the
mention of Jack Bauer from 24, a popular instance of a supposed good guy
abusing others to protect the nation.
For as heady and splainy as it can get at times, the
impassioned performances combined with Burns’ scope both as a writer and as a
visual storyteller keep things nice and engaging. Hell, it might be a better
Soderbergh film than Soderbergh himself managed to release this year. And for a
rather high-profile return to the director’s chair, with a film more people are
likely to have heard of (Writing and memorising details about films is my main
hobby, and even I couldn’t tell you much about PU-239), Scott Z. Burns
ends his year of very solid efforts, between his work with Soderbergh on
Contagion and Side Effects to his brilliant scripting on James Marsh’s The Mercy, on an equally solid note.
No comments:
Post a Comment