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?

The Man Who Went Into the Cold: BRIDGE OF SPIES

A powerfully humane legal drama, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies tells the story of James Donovan, an American lawyer who, at the height of the Cold War, was asked to defend an alleged Soviet spy. Donovan’s humble professional commitment to fairness, justice, the value of hard work, and the worth of all persons takes his case much further than he ever expected, into the halls of United States’ power and beyond, into shadowy negotiations between foreign powers. This causes much fear and prejudice directed towards him, his family’s doubts and worries about the stigma of providing legal aid to an enemy spy validated in the sneers he gets when recognized in public, and by the bullets shot through their front window by some angry concerned citizen. Even the cops responding to that frightening incident wear a how-could-you snarl.

This is a story that affirms with beautiful moral clarity aspirational bedrock American values, but not the sanctimonious sort used as smarmy stand-ins for greed, intolerance, and crypto-fascism. It’s a hopeful movie with Capra-esque ideals upheld and uplifted: kindness, compassion, empathy, and the willingness to do what good you can. Late in the film the lawyer, weary from his task, confides, “It’s not what other people think. It’s what you know you did.” We see Donovan as a man who values his logic and thinking, preparation and good judgment, tenaciously following his moral compass. Who else could embody those qualities but Tom Hanks? With every passing year his screen presence embodies more easy everyman paternal gravitas, the sort that used to be found in Lewis Stone’s Judge Hardy, vintage Atticus Finch, or evening newscasters. His projecting steady moral certitude goes a long way selling this earnest material.

Of course it also helps that Spielberg is a master filmmaker whose works are almost unfailingly absorbing and well crafted yarns. Here he’s taking talky scenes of legal process and tense negotiations and making them riveting. He has a script by Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of dry dialogue and complicated plotting, and the effect is watching great voices working seamlessly together. From a draft by Matt Charman, they’ve generously provided an unrelenting tick-tock pace and fluid crackling conversations. It’s a true story told with warm humor and disarming expressions of wit and character in every exchange, a lively and reverent story that’s as entertaining as it is moving. Donovan is a character who exudes decency, and who is generally a nice guy, stubborn only in his belief that even one person can make a difference. It’s amazing how much humor and suspense can be wrung out of good old plain niceness.

Spielberg opens with a great silent cat-and-mouse espionage sequence that introduces the Soviet spy (Mark Rylance, calm, sly, meticulous, droll, unknowable) as he’s captured. From there the film quickly sets up the trial, intercutting Americans abroad who are on a path to importance in the plot later on. Complicated geopolitical terrain and historical context are brought to life with immediate vivid clarity, while characters’ dynamics are established with wordless flickers of expression and clever blocking. The sharp dialogue is nonstop, and Spielberg knows his way around a scene, moving lightly and clearly through exposition, allowing clever turns of phrase to land with pleasing snaps. The storytelling economy is breathtaking, especially as a potentially muddled everyman-turns-LeCarre plot unspools with riveting precision and perfect focus. There are scenes with layers of subterfuge, where characters we’ve never met are, through smart placement of details, instantly understood to be putting on a show for the sake of spycraft.

For spycraft is what enters the film as the CIA understandably wants to use the captured spy for their own interests, using him as leverage in some high-stakes, top-secret Cold War negotiations. A wry handler (Scott Shepherd) ends up recruiting Donovan for the task as civilian middleman for the government’s offers, the better to disavow if it all goes wrong. This creates a complicated scenario in which Donovan is more prepared to follow the letter of the law than agents eager to punish the Russians in any way they can, and through which the layman can never be sure how much truth is being told by any other person he’s talking to, even and especially suspicious Soviet and East German agents (Mikhail Gorevoy and Sebastian Koch). The air is thick with Cold War paranoia as frigid and frosty as snow-swept Berlin streets. Spielberg has once again entrusted a film’s look to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski who here captures every bit of the uncertain situation and the sturdy man at its center in fluid camera movements and gorgeous textures, bathing grey areas in cold blue and white glow from every light source.

Spielberg and crew create a sympathetic political drama, attentive to actors’ movements and expressions in relation to one another with gentle precision. (His longtime editor Michael Kahn provides sharp cuts and meaningful juxtapositions, while accommodating unshowy one-take master shots.) It thoroughly humanizes every participant. We see little home life (though what we do is drawn in great shorthand by the likes of Amy Ryan and Eve Hewson), little of the men whose lives are being potentially traded by their governments. Instead, we’re to view people as the movie tells us Donovan does: as equally valuable human lives. Take, for instance, Rylance’s caught spy, who dryly assesses his plight, sees Donovan as an admirable advocate, and in the end emerges not as a martyred other or enemy combatant, but as a man, warm, pragmatic, and doing his best. We see in the faces of every man in a suit a person who’s juggling expectations of bosses and countries, who might be convinced to do what’s best through nothing more than the right smart argument.

Like so many of Spielberg’s historical dramas, Bridge of Spies puts his skill for crowd-pleasing spectacle to use illuminating sharp complicated ideas. In this case, hard-fought optimism emerges from clear and refreshing political resonances. It’d be difficult not to think of our gridlocked national discourse while watching a movie squarely situated on a talking cure, the value of compromise, of speaking with those you hate or distrust to find mutually agreeable ways forward. (It makes a fine pairing with his last film, Lincoln, in that regard.) Donovan realizes there are reasons to find fault with life behind the Iron Curtain, seeing fleeing Germans gunned down on the wall, knowing an American POW is tortured in interrogation that’s certainly “enhanced.” But still he insists the Americans treat their prisoner well, ensures a fair trial, and follows due process every step of the way. Hanks wears this American heroism in all its exhausting, modest, rewarding weight. The film is a deeply moving vision of a man doing the right thing in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.