Body Politic: THE REPORT and QUEEN & SLIM

Two movies out this weekend take politics as an explicit subject and make it personal. Their ideas and ideals are embodied in flesh and blood characters who are sensitively drawn and inhabited. They also come out of dependable lineages: one a based-on-a-true-story procedural docudrama, the other an agitprop thriller-of-sorts. The former is The Report, a rare directorial effort for its screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who has written a number of Soderbergh films from this past decade. As with those works — like Contagion and The Laundromat — this one has a cool layer of clinical just-the-facts terseness that’s continually enlivened by an impassioned ensemble. It follows a determined Senate staffer (Adam Driver) assigned by his boss, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), to lead an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture — infamously euphemised as “enhanced interrogation” — in the War on Terror. Over the course of years, he doggedly reads through thousands of documents and takes testimony of whistleblowers, all the while given the run-around by two administrations who’d rather not dig up too much of a mess. In fact, the CIA itself refuses to make its employees available for official interviews, stonewalls every attempt to corroborate basic facts, disputes every finding of which they catch wind, and disappears critical documents from the servers to which they have granted access. The film is as single-minded in its drive toward justice as its main character, seeing it maddeningly delayed and denied even as the mounting evidence is ever more sickening and overwhelmingly convincing.

Burns cuts all character down to the bone, devoting no time to the personal lives of these figures. Instead, it’s all back rooms and black sites, plush offices and austere conference rooms in which the critical work of keeping citizens safe with high ideals of transparency and ethics is regularly plowed under or studiously ignored by people too cowardly to do anything about it lest they jeopardize their job, or the power of their office. A swirl of recognizable actors in suits — Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Tim Blake Nelson, Ted Levine, Scott Shepherd, Matthew Rhys, and more — speak the roles’ serious points with clipped professionalism and excellent shorthand personalities. Burns juggles an enormous amount of facts and faces, in ways reminiscent of All the President’s Men and Spotlight, with clarity and intelligence, navigating the competing goals and half-spoken power plays that consume this search for truth. A thriller about research, it makes its claims and proves them thoroughly and in dramatic fashion. It’s compelling every step of the way, and, by picking its moments sparingly and well, earns its righteous indignation in tense monologues and grim final title cards. I was reminded of an aphorism Soderbergh tweeted years ago: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

Queen & Slim is a woozier affair, dreamy and romantic even as it never loses a fatal undercurrent sparked by its provocative what-if? inciting incident. It starts with a first date, hesitant and awkward. He (Daniel Kaluuya) is a sad-eyed Costco clerk looking for a fun night; she (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a lawyer looking for a temporary reprieve to her loneliness. His car ever-so-slightly swerves, barely crossing a lane of traffic, but enough of a reason for a cop to pull them over. Driving while black appears to be the charge, and when the officer gets flustered and frustrated that they haven’t been drinking and have no contraband in the vehicle, he takes offense at an honest inquiry and pulls a gun. By the end of the confusion that follows, the cop is dead on the side of the road. The accidental cop-killing couple is left with no choice but to run, certain that no police force in the country would believe it was self-defense. What follows could be a white-knuckle chase picture, but is instead a languid road trip as they make their way south in hopes of avoiding capture, perhaps somewhere below the border eventually. There’s a sense of futility and doom to their endeavor even before a garrulous pimp (Bokeem Woodbine) calls them “the black Bonnie and Clyde.” Director Melina Matsoukas — the filmmaker behind striking music videos, including a portion of Beyonce’s brilliant Lemonade — gives it all a glowing style, contemplative and deliberative, with perfectly-composed stretches of moody lighting, expressive blocking and poised motion. She has a great eye. The film photographs skin so it glows, places so they shine, poses so they become easily iconographic. There’s a moment where Queen and Slim get their picture taken lounging on the hood of a car and, even before it shows up again, knows it was a memorable image — it’d make a great poster or t-shirt if and when the movie becomes a cult object.

There’s a carefully composed cool to the film, which could perhaps run counter to the underlying anger at the unfairness in this world, but is poignant as the characters themselves wrestle with knowing that what they’ve done and who they are will be reduced, their complicated emotions and lives whittled down until their legacy is mere legend. Lena Waithe’s script plays off the justified outrage from a decade marked by tragic viral cell phone videos of police executing unarmed black people, and the resulting swirl of attention ending in the officers, more often than not, getting away with it. That the film opens with a forceful reversal of the sadly typical conclusion is a tremendous jolt. Its energy powers the film through its dull patches and misjudged moments. The uneven episodes on their trip — encounters with a variety of black folks, a few white wild cards, and a handful of cops — are sometimes tense, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always poised in the same hazy mood of melancholy. It’s as uneven and prolonged as it is lit up with ideas. Even when the film goes totally off the mark — there’s a violent plot turn in a protest that’s both more than the film needs and cross-cut with a steamy sex scene; that throws the film off balance for next few sequences — it’s not for lack of trying.

Throughout the lead characters are specific and symbolic, their romance as real as the positions into which they are placed can be forced. It’s never entirely a character drama it often is. The people can be too composed under the style. And it's never fully the blaxploitation riff it skirts around -- resisting the potential for genre play most of the time, even as it leans on some of its signifiers. It's both and neither. The film is too serious-minded to be reduced to tropes, but too energized by its premise to avoid it entirely. Call it prestige exploitation. What’s ultimately moving about the picture, though, is how these characters are allowed to be with each other, in the ultimate bad first date that lingers and expands, trapped together with plenty of time to connect and contrast until the inevitable end. At one point, Slim asks why they can’t just be — a question that hangs over the film as the promise of extrajudicial violence hangs over the characters. Who would they be if they weren't now defined by the constant potential threat to their bodies?

In the Details: DEVIL

The world of Devil is in trouble right from the opening frames. Gliding gray establishing shots of Philadelphia create an immediate sense of unease just by being upside down. The world is off-kilter. Something is very wrong. Narration from a skyscraper’s superstitious security guard (Jacob Vargas) tells us that the Devil can torment the damned while they still live by entering our world through spaces created by suicides. No sooner than the frame reorients itself, a person jumps out of one of the building’s high windows.

Soon after the policeman with a tragic past (Chris Messina) shows up to investigate, the real trouble starts. An elevator mysteriously breaks down leaving five people stuck suspended over twenty stories high. One is a sleazy mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend). Another (Bokeem Woodbine) is one of the building’s security team, though it’s unfortunately only his second day. Also along for the ride are a spooked young woman (Bojana Novakovic), a suspicious elderly lady (Jenny O’Hara), and a guy with a sketchy beard of stubble (Logan Marshall-Green).

The cast remains stuck there for most of the movie as the plot unravels like Irwin Allen by way of Rod Serling. They aren’t exactly the most compelling bunch of characters, but the way they inevitably turn on each other is tensely exciting. The script by Brian Nelson, from a story concept by M. Night Shyamalan, is efficient, wrapping the whole thing up in a little less than 80 minutes. It turns out the deaths, and ratchets up the suspense, like clockwork. The lights go out. We hear ominous noises, punctuated by shouts and screams and various other sorts of exclamations. When the lights flicker back to life, there is one less person alive in that elevator. Who is the murderer? Spoiler alert: the answer is in the title.

The unconvincing pseudo-religious premise, which had me hopelessly wishing a third-act twist would reveal a real-world solution to the killings, is worn a little too heavily. But director John Erick Dowdle makes sure the proceedings move along quickly and creepily. The cinematography by the great Tak Fujimoto turns out surprisingly varied images, cannily exploiting claustrophobia and acrophobia. The movie has a strong sense of both confinement and extreme height that keeps the sense of danger omnipresent. I was much more unnerved by the feeling of being stuck in an elevator and the potential of a sudden drop than I was by any of the supernatural goofiness that adorns the plot.

The final moments overreach, as do various moments throughout the movie that border on just plain silly. A security guard talks about how everything in the building is going wrong this day and punctuates this by tossing a piece of toast in the air. It lands jelly side down. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find wasted toast particularly frightening.

What I do find frightening is how effectively this movie worked on me. It’s silly and inessential, but I can’t deny that it had me shivering for more or less the entire time. Fujimoto’s images got under my skin. Dowdle’s brisk direction of Nelson’s thin script moves along swiftly and keeps things agreeably eerie. This is a dumb little suspenseful horror movie that’s sheer simplicity works.