The Unbearable Realism of The Comey Rule

A range of us fancy our fiction to be life like, with plausible eventualities and nuanced, recognizably human protagonists—and meanwhile we fancy our nonfiction to be unfamiliar, corpulent of absurd speak twists and higher than existence characters. It’s no longer so mighty that we prefer fiction and nonfiction to converge in one speak as that we prefer them to swap areas, fancy ships passing in the night, each and every certain for the assorted’s level of origin.

This paradox changed into once on my thoughts all around the almost four hours of Showtime’s two-allotment miniseries The Comey Rule, adapted from frail FBI Director James Comey’s bestselling 2018 memoir, which bears the more anxious title A Elevated Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. To the higher of my figuring out, The Comey Rule is an glowing retelling of some well-documented and undeniably crucial historic events that took speak between 2015 and 2017. It has a first-rate solid—alongside with Jeff Daniels as Comey, Holly Hunter as Sally Yates, Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe, Jonathan Banks as James Clapper, and a standout Brendon Gleeson as Donald Trump—and is written and directed by Billy Ray, who is accountable for such artful variations of honest events as Captain Phillips and the beautiful Shattered Glass (which recounts a scandal at this very journal). And but the events it depicts, all of which in point of fact came about, nonetheless force credulity, and looking out at them reproduced feels no longer easy—more so than in other motion images in response to most up-to-date events. The inquire I saved asking myself changed into once whether that changed into once Ray’s fault or mine, and whether there’s any capacity to dramatize the story of Donald Trump’s election and its aftermath that doesn’t in point of fact feel demeaning to everybody eager.

The first episode begins with Comey’s interview for the FBI director job with President Barack Obama (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and ends with Trump’s shock take dangle of in November 2016, correct days after Comey selected to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s exercise of a non-public e mail server, that can well indulge in swung the election final result. I learned myself groaning thru mighty of this, but it changed into once complex to parse how mighty of my discomfort changed into once with the movie itself, somewhat than the excruciating calamity of the 2016 election. I’m no fan of Clinton or her campaign—I supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 major sooner than dutifully voting for Clinton in the overall—but that doesn’t compose it from now on beautiful to be reminded how mighty nationwide vitality changed into once expended on her emails. We already lived thru these events in honest time, and loads of individuals spent the following One year or two litigating them and can decide never to factor in them all but again. Whenever you occur to never fully understood why Comey made the decisions he did relating to the electronic mail investigation, The Comey Rule does a solid job of laying out his opinion task, but your total viewer can in point of fact assemble with that info is speak “You idiot!” repeatedly at their laptop laptop.

Comey himself is a glowing example of this uncanny valley between plausible fiction and mighty nonfiction. Daniels performs him as a gentle-mannered boy scout, a loved and empathetic boss and crew player with a ideal dwelling and a ideal family, a make of aw-shucks American everyman whose one tragic flaw is that he’s convinced if he correct maintains his indulge in deepest integrity, nothing inaccurate would possibly maybe just end up. This makes him considerably disturbing to the savvier political operatives he clashes with, who understand, as most of us assemble in retrospect, that wonderful intentions can soundless indulge in disastrous penalties. Comey, in other phrases, makes hundreds of sense as a fictional protagonist, and if any individual made him up we would nod alongside at a familiar archetype. Unfortunately, he’s honest and has consciously styled himself this capacity (it sells hundreds of books and paid speeches), and we all have to are residing alongside with his errors.

The 2nd episode covers Comey’s tenure below Trump forward of his imperfect firing and subsequent testimony sooner than Congress, and is mighty higher, carried largely by the strength of Gleeson’s performance as Trump. Again, the road between fiction and actuality is an initial hurdle; Gleeson’s hair and makeup scrutinize ridiculous, but they’re supposed to. His divulge and his line offer and his frequent audible sniffs are absurd, but no longer more than the honest Trump’s are. We would possibly maybe just no longer have to are residing in an global where this comic strip villain is the president, but we assemble, and by agreeing to take a seat down thru The Comey Rule we indulge in moreover implicitly agreed to give Gleeson a probability to assemble something with this unbearable persona that hasn’t been finished sooner than.

What Gleeson and Ray understand about the president that, as an illustration, Alec 1st Earl 1st earl baldwin of bewdley of Bewdley doesn’t, is that Trump is at the least as mighty a probability as he is a clown. Gleeson’s Trump is deeply unsettling to scrutinize and to be in the identical room with, something most of us indulge in no longer in my conception skilled. Here is The Comey Rule’s most highly efficient takeaway: We’ve all watched Trump on TV and learn his tweets, and in either context, it ought to even be very comical when he complains about cable info rankings or the dimensions of his inauguration crowds. But factor in having to enter the Oval Office in January 2017 and shake his hand, to scrutinize him in the conception, to be polite and legit whereas he drones on about these topics. Per chance, you wouldn’t chortle; as an more than just a few, you’d in point of fact feel bodily unclean and psychically violated.

In hindsight, the foremost episode tees us up well for the 2nd. The Comey Rule starts off as what I’ve termed a Beltway procedural, that familiar West Hover–impressed trend in which very clear political operatives bicker over the wordings of wonderful paperwork and press releases. These kinds of oldsters can’t stand one one more—Rod Rosenstein (Lunge McNairy), who serves as the sequence’s unlikely narrator, performs Aaron Burr to Comey’s Alexander Hamilton, a sniveling careerist who finds his stubbornly principled counterpart insufferable. But they’re all true to the identical institutional norms which indulge in lengthy prevailed in Washington and that The Comey Rule unapologetically celebrates in its cringiest scenes.

Whenever you occur to’re a skeptic of these institutional norms—if, fancy me, you’re the roughly leftist who finds it complex to root for the FBI—then this is precisely as mighty of a scuttle as you’d question. But once Trump and his cronies enter the White House, the story turns into loads more compelling. Critics of the pre-Trump Washington region quo would possibly maybe just revel in the root of all these hacks and feds being humiliated and abused by Trump’s regime. What if Comey and his ilk got what they deserved, even though it came at a horrific fee to the American public and the comfort of the sphere? But it’s more challenging to get rid of care of that conceit when looking out at The Comey Rule’s most memorable scenes, the ones depicting first-person interactions between the Trump White House and the occupation civil servants at the FBI and the Division of Justice. Even when you occur to’ve learn your total info coverage of, as an illustration, Comey’s one-on-one dinner with Trump, or Yates’s meetings with the White House counsel, what the actors and Ray’s screenplay provide is the visceral expertise of attempting to get rid of care of 1’s dignity whereas taking orders from predators and cretins.

Whereas these scenes compose for gigantic drama, they don’t solve the central distress with The Comey Rule, and with the force of MSNBC liberalism it panders to: that the legit dignity and institutional norms of Washington bureaucrats are the foremost stakes. At one level, we’re treated to a cloying lecture by Yates (directed at a fictional African American aide, performed by Dalmar Abuzeid, whose characteristic in the script is to settle for the entire lot she says at face price) about how the executive buildings lining Pennsylvania Avenue portray some make of eternal civic ideal, one that we’re assured will outlast Trump’s tawdry reign. That the pre-Trump FBI headquarters or U.S. Capitol or White House would possibly maybe portray something more grisly, at the least to just a few individuals, is regularly entertained.

As far as I’m in a position to uncover from looking out at this sequence, the FBI exists to salvage rapists and murderers, to end mass shootings and terror attacks, to fastidiously investigate corruption without any partisan agenda, and to defend our political machine in opposition to Russian interference. It surely doesn’t exist to faucet civil rights leaders’ telephones, to blacklist and arrest left-fly dissidents, or to bait panicked Muslim young individuals with counterterrorism sting operations. When Comey meets with Obama early on to focus on working the FBI, he acknowledges that he voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney and that he is to the president’s factual on felony justice reform, but says cheap individuals can disagree about policy issues—an earnest bipartisan appeal that Obama eagerly accepts on behalf of the presumed audience. But looking out at The Comey Rule after months of mass protests in opposition to racist policing, it’s disturbing to see the honest human penalties of complex-on-crime policies bound unacknowledged.

Moreover that Trump makes public servants fancy Comey in point of fact feel depressed, the sequence’ major transient in opposition to the most up-to-date president appears to be like to be that having an alleged sexual predator overcome the would-be first girl president is traumatizing for thousands and thousands of females and girls, an dread expressed by Comey’s necessary other, Patrice (Jennifer Ehle), and their four daughters. Here is valid, and positively price acknowledging, but it’s moreover one more example of how Ray’s script understands politics primarily as a contest of symbolism and signifiers, somewhat than as an enviornment for self-discipline cloth issues. It would possibly maybe no longer had been no longer easy to shoehorn in just a few references to those issues: to Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim bound back and forth ban (which none as a replace of Sally Yates refused to place into effect), or his white nationalist ties, or his assault on reproductive rights, or his gleeful despoliation of the atmosphere—or, in a final-minute closing title card at the least, how more than 200,000 American citizens indulge in died of Covid-19 on his scrutinize. But none of that made it into The Comey Rule. As an more than just a few we’re left with this: Trump is crude, incompetent, predatory, felony, likely mentally ailing, and a beneficiary of Russian election interference—which, we’re reminded in a parting level to, remains a are residing jam in 2020.

All of this is ethical, but none of it sufficiently captures the honest prices that Comey’s naïveté and self-righteousness at a key moment inflicted on all of us four years ago. Those buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue will absolutely endure the Trump period, and so will Comey’s speaking prices, but far too many harmless lives indulge in no longer and won’t.