Review: "The Comey Rule" is Essential Viewing

By destroying disinformation, director Billy Ray’s new miniseries is the opposite of propaganda. It's also entertaining as hell.

LET’S START with the preliminaries. The Comey Rule, the two-part miniseries which premieres this Sunday on Showtime, is a masterful piece of storytelling. Writer-director Billy Ray somehow managed to take a complicated jumble of historical events, with too many bit players and not enough major characters, and turn it into two nights of streamlined, compelling, rousing television. (It helps that the performances—highlighted by Jeff Daniels as James Comey, House of Cards’s Michael Kelly as Andy McCabe, Holly Hunter as Sally Yates, and Brendan Gleeson as a deliciously villainous Donald John Trump—are all top notch.) The film is well made, entertaining, and above all important—not just “must-see TV,” but essential viewing for all civic-minded Americans.

Essentially a single three-and-a-half-hour film with a conveniently placed intermission, The Comey Rule plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy. Like Lear, who is also surrounded by his daughters, Comey is undone by a glaring character flaw: his obdurate need for truth and transparency above all else. His belief that justice transcends politics. His stubborn refusal to allow political considerations to sway his thinking. And his inability to understand that that, too, is political. Playing it by the book is political. Staying neutral is political. As Rush sings every day on FM radio: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Adding to the Shakespeare vibe is the use of Rod Rosenstein (Scoot McNairy) as a sort of Duke of Albany, by way of J. Alfred Prufrock. Seriously, though: this pathetic, sniveling weasel seems to have had these lines from Eliot written just for him:

No! I am not [Jim Comey], nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Rosenstein has all of Iago’s jealousy but none of Iago’s will. His reaction to being told that he must appoint a special counsel, after being coerced to take the blame for Comey’s abrupt dismissal, is perhaps the film’s most surprising moment.

Viewers expecting to see Gleeson’s inventive take on Trump on the first night will be disappointed. He appears for an instant, at the exact midpoint, and then briefly at the very end, but does not speak until the second installment; like Steven Spielberg with Jaws, Ray knows not to show too much shark too soon. But the performance is worth waiting for. This is not the usual mimicry, or Trump as caricature. Gleeson portrays him with mad mobster menace, a discomfiting combination of Brando in The Godfather and Brando in Apocalypse Now—a worthy adversary. A bad guy.

And The Comey Rule has to have a bad guy, because it is also a cop movie. Practically every cop movie ever made involves a lone wolf policeman, who plays by his own rules, butting heads with a straight-arrow supervisor, who does everything by the book: Dirty Harry, Axel Foley, Jack Bauer, John McClane—Frank Drebin, even. The Comey Rule is, among many other things, a cautionary tale of what happens when that straight-arrow supervisor is the protagonist, and locks down the lone wolf cops, and gets his way—and also happens to be the Director of the FBI, presiding simultaneously over the two most important criminal investigations in our nation’s history.

Some reviewers have criticized Ray for not being hard enough on James Comey. The A/V Club calls The Comey Rule “pure hagiography,” while Variety accuses the director of being “in [Comey’s] thrall.” While the film is certainly Comey-centric (it’s based on his memoir, after all), it is less an apologia than a faithful dramatization of events as Comey describes them. But, I mean, does anyone think this Boy Scout ne plus ultra is lying? About any of this? That Ray should have viewed A Higher Loyalty with skepticism, as if it were written by the mendacious likes of Michael Cohen or Sarah Huckabee Sanders? If Jim Comey is not a reliable narrator, who is?

The real question here is: Did Comey, who was trying so hard to do the right thing, actually do the right thing? To its credit, the film doesn’t take a strong position on that. It shows us the facts, invites us to stand in Comey’s shoes, and asks: What would you do, if you were caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the two on-going investigations?

In Dirty Rubles, which dropped in May of 2018, I had this to say about the former FBI Director:

Director Comey bungled things so badly in October 2016 that the very fate of the nation hangs, present tense, in the balance…

In October of 2016, the FBI was actively investigating 1) Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and 2) Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Comey chose only to inform the public about the former. How exactly was it not “misleading…the American people…not to supplement the record” about Trump’s illicit dealings with Moscow?...

When Comey testified before Congress on 20 March 2017, he abandoned “Glomar” and instead confirmed that the FBI was indeed “investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts.” If the Director could ignore “Glomar” on 20 March 2017, in breach of protocol concerning on-going investigations, why did he not see fit to do so five months sooner, when it might have done some good?….

However, it must also be said that since Election Day [2016], Comey has done everything in his power to redeem himself, and served as the model of probity and honor that this country desperately needs.

While I certainly sympathize with Comey’s damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t plight, nothing in this supposed “hagiography” has changed my mind. I better understood why he did what he did, BUT to me, the takeaway of The Comey Rule is that his tragic flaw is what screwed him, and us—and, therefore, yes: he is to blame for giving us Trump, the mobbed-up carnival barker who Comey knew—and was one of precious few people to know for sure—was in cahoots with the Russians.

“The job is about protecting people,” he says at one point in the film. If that is true, Comey failed, spectacularly, in his most essential duty. He played it by the book, ignoring the lone wolves—Peter Strzuk, Lisa Page, Andy McCabe—howling in his inner circle. He chose to safeguard the Bureau, and thus failed to safeguard the country.

Not everyone appreciated the mastery at work here. In panning the film, Liam Matthews at TV Guide says The Comey Rule “operates from a false premise,” but never manages to articulate what that false premise is. “The show fails to adequately contextualize Comey’s mistakes,” Matthews explains, of a film that is a well-oiled 200-minute contextualization of Comey’s mistakes. The critic later complains that the finished product is “hamstrung by a journalistic approach,” which suggests that maybe the contextualization was effective after all. “It’s a failure as an attempt to clarify recent history,” he says, “made worse by a series of artless creative choices,” leaving me to wonder how a presumed TV critic could be so blindingly ignorant of both recent history and the art of filmmaking—but only until the very end of the review, when Matthews discloses that he supported the Russia-backed spoiler candidate Bernie Sanders, not just in 2016, when it was excusable, but in 2020, when it was decidely not.

Hank Stuever of the Washington Post, meanwhile, grouses that it’s still too soon for this sort of thing—clearly a dig at Ray’s insistence that the film drop before the election. “The story’s unsettled nature is proof enough that all of this still needs time to ferment before anyone tries to make it into captivating material for TV and film,” Stuever opines. A critic in 1940 could have said much the same about The Great Dictator. “Other than being able to say it got there first, The Comey Rule could certainly have waited—until after the election, or until some other era down the road.” Yeah, and Charlie Chaplin should have waited until after the Second World War to take on the Nazis. “Sure, Hitler invaded and occupied Poland, in a rebuke of the agreement made with Chamberlain at Munich, and he’s mobilizing on the French border as I type this, but we should wait to decide if he’s actually a bad guy.”

As with The Great Dictator—which, while satire, shone a spotlight on the abominable essence of Hitler and his Nazis—the greatest strength of The Comey Rule is that—brace yourselves—it shows what actually happened. No fake news to be found. While Ray takes some liberties with dramatic license, as any film like this must, he hews faithfully to the actual timeline of events—and in so doing, completely dismantles four of MAGA’s pet talking points:

MAGA claim #1: The FBI investigation began with the phony Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton campaign.

The truth: The investigation began months earlier, after George Papadopoulos got drunk and bragged to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had lots of dirt on Hillary that he heard about from his buddy, Professor Misfud, who was tight with Putin. Also, the so-called dossier—really a series of raw intelligence memos written by former spy Christopher Steele—was originally financed by an anti-Trump Republican.

MAGA claim #2: Michael Flynn has been treated very badly! He was illegally “unmasked” because the NSA was illegally recording his phone conversations.

The truth: Flynn was unmasked because he was the in-coming national security adviser, who was having a series of conversations from the Dominican Republic, on a non-secure line, with the Russian ambassador to the United States, whose calls are routinely tapped. Then he lied about it, even though he must have known that the FBI agents had the transcript of him talking about things he told them he didn’t talk about. The film portrays him a doofus, but if he wasn’t a doofus, how did he get played so easily by both Russia and the FBI?

MAGA claim #3: Obama bugged Trump Tower!

The truth: This isn’t even mentioned in the film because it’s fucking insane. If the NSA was listening to Trump, or anyone in his circle, it was because they were having conversations with foreign nationals of enemy states. FISA warrants are very, very hard to get.

MAGA claim #4: The FBI went easy on Hillary because it was out to get Trump.

The truth: To the contrary, the Bureau for many months sicced a team of its top agents on the “Hillary email” investigation, laboriously poring over every last piece of her (mostly banal) correspondence. That investment deprived other, more exigent investigations of critical resources. In other words: by sucking up so much oxygen, the the HRC wild goose chase hindered the Trump/Russia investigation.

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I’m so conditioned to the experience of watching TV series that when The Comey Rule was over, I found myself thinking, “I can’t wait for Season Two!” Ray could easily make a sequel. The film boasts one grouchy cameo of Robert Mueller (Peter Coyote), but he doesn’t appear at all in the second installment, even as the Office of the Special Counsel is mentioned.

What we need to see next is The Mueller Rule, showing the inner workings—and the failings—of the OSC team charged with investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. The theme is the same: an even more by-the-book supervisor chooses strict adherence to the letter of the law over saving the country.

The lesson is clear: When they go low—when the nation faces an unprecedented threat from a hostile foreign government working in concert with a compromised POTUS—we don’t need another Boy Scout. We need Dirty Harry. We need Axel Foley. We need Jack Bauer. We need John McClane. We need Frank Drebin, even.

Cry havoc and let slip the lone wolves.

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Photos: Brendan Gleeson as Trump and Jeff Daniels as Comey.