The film had its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019. It was released in theaters in the United States by Amazon Studios on November 15, 2019, two weeks before it began streaming on Amazon Prime on November 29. Critical reviews of the film were generally positive.
Intelligence psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell were contracted in 2002 to instruct the CIA in EITs. They started their work on Abu Zubaydah, for whom the FBI initially used the CIA rapport-building, where they started using EITs.
Jones learned from an FBI agent that he gathered crucial intelligence from Zubaydah before the CIA took over the interrogations,[6][7][8] though the agency claims that most valuable intel came from EITs.[9] He shows evidence from the CIA's own records that prove that the agency falsely claimed that Zubaydah was a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda to received authorization to start using EITs on him.[10]
A physician assistant with the Office of Medical Services who works at a CIA black site secretly reveals to Jones that he and other medical professionals had complained that the EITs were torture. However, they only got told to stop putting their objections in writing by the Director.
Among files provided by the CIA, Jones finds the Panetta Review, a critical internal CIA review of the EIT program that was prepared in 2009 but never shared.[a] A pundit on the news later claims that EITs had yielded good intelligence and prevented terrorist attacks.
Jones stays up all night to disprove the claims, and the CIA's own records show that crucial information it is claiming to have obtained by subjecting a terrorist[b] to torture was obtained by other means.
Jones finishes the 6,200-page report, and it is approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Feinstein, on December 13, 2012, and sent to the CIA for final comments. Two months later, John Brennan is sworn in as the new director of the CIA. Brennan sets up meetings with CIA personnel and Jones to try to get the committee to change elements of the report.
However, Jones repeatedly provides evidence to back up everything they want to change. Feinstein decides to stop this discussion with the CIA and keep the report as it is. Frustrated, Jones reveals the Panetta Review to Senator Mark Udall of the Intelligence Committee. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the nomination of the CIA general counsel, Udall asks why both the committee's reports and the Panetta Review conflict with the CIA's official position.[11]
The CIA, humiliated by Udall's revelation, conducts an illegal search and threaten to prosecute Jones for "stealing" the Panetta Review from the CIA's computers. Jones hints the search to the New York Times national security reporter, which ultimately leads Feinstein to formally accuse the CIA of unlawfully searching the Senate's computers in violation of the separation of powers. Brennan and the CIA are forced to back down, and the charges against Jones are dropped.
Feinstein tells Jones that she is prepared to release a shorter summary of the report, but President Barack Obama grants the CIA broad authority to redact it first. When it becomes uncertain if the released document will have any useful information after redaction, Jones again meets with the Times reporter, but ultimately decides not to leak the report to the media.[12]
The Republican Party wins control of the Senate in the November 2014 midterm elections, meaning that the report will likely be buried forever when the new Congress is sworn in January 2015. Faced with this deadline, the Senate agrees to release the summary of the report. Feinstein gives a speech summarizing the report and its implications, and then Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, gives an impassioned speech supporting the report.
Jones leaves his job as a Senate staffer after the report summary released. No CIA officers are criminally charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report, with many promoted, and one[c] later becomes the agency director.
When asked by PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about his motivation for making a film inspired by the controversial 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, Burns replied that both of his parents are psychologists, and he found it "appalling" to learn from the report[15] that "people had figured out a way to weaponize psychology," a profession that "exists to help people."[16] Burns further said that he and producer Steven Soderbergh felt it reflected well on the United States that the government allowed the summary of the report to be published. In the same interview, Soderbergh said he did not know "that there's another country, other than maybe Canada or the UK," that "would have even allowed this kind of investigation."[16]
Some of the characters that appear in the film are composite characters, such as Bernadette, who bears some resemblance to Gina Haspel. Haspel oversaw the CIA black site in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah was tortured, and later managed to push her bosses to destroy the tapes of the torture. According to the CIA, Haspel was not, however, in charge of the site during Zubaydah's interrogation.[17]
The Report had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019,[21] and Amazon Studios acquired its distribution rights shortly thereafter for $14 million.[22] In October, it appeared as a spotlight film at the Hamptons International Film Festival.[23] In the United States, the film was scheduled for a theatrical release on September 27, 2019, two weeks before its streaming release on Amazon Prime Video on October 11,[24] but those dates were changed to November 15 and November 29, respectively.[25]
Reception
Box office
Unlike with its previous titles, Amazon did not publicly disclose The Report's theatrical grosses, but IndieWire estimated that it grossed around $150,000 from 84 theaters over its opening weekend. The site wrote that "the response, so far as we can determine, are [sic] under the usual Amazon performance."[26] Playing in just 60 theaters the following weekend, the film made an estimated $75,000.[2]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 82% of 245 critics' reviews of the film are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "The Report draws on a dark chapter in American history to offer a sober, gripping account of one public servant's crusade for accountability."[27] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on reviews by 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[28] Certain critics compared the film to political thrillers from the 1970s, in contrast to more recent works. For instance, Owen Gleiberman of Variety said he found The Report "at once gripping and eye-opening" in a way that made him think of All the President's Men (1976).[29]
Human Rights First awarded the 2019 Sidney Lumet Award for Integrity in Entertainment to The Report.[30] In 2020, the film won the Cinema for Peace Award for Political Film of the Year.
↑ The Panetta Review was a secret review of the use of torture by the CIA under the administration of George W. Bush, which was conducted by then CIA director Leon Panetta, who served under President Obama as CIA director from February 19, 2009, until June 30, 2011. According to a March 7, 2014, New York Timesarticle, the review yielded a series of memoranda that "cast a particularly harsh light" on the Bush-era interrogation program."
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