Here’s what I wrote in my article about Paul Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed:

…yeah, the whole voiceover of journal entries, living in an austere set of rooms, pouring hard liquor onto his cereal business already felt too familiar, so when the main character started cobbling together an assassination plot, and especially when he found himself needing to change plans in a panic, the movie started to feel less like First Reformed than like Second Taxi Driver.

And here’s Third Taxi Driver!  Though I don’t know Paul Schra­der’s whole filmography⁠—for all I know this is his tenth rehash of his iconic ’70s film.  But yeah, here we’ve got a guy who spends his downtime in motel rooms that he deliberately makes as aus­tere as possible, writing in his journal as we listen to him deliver voiceovers about expiating his past sins and whatnot, who gets wrapped up in an assassination plot, and yes, there’s a last-min­ute change of plans.  The wrinkle is that this time the loner pro­tagonist (Bill) who has seen some shit during the war is tracked down by a college-aged guy (Cirk) who is the one with the actual assassination plot in mind.  Cirk explains that he’d had a horrific upbringing because his father had been an abusive monster, and his father had been trained to be an abusive monster when he worked as a torturer for the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War.  He has sought out Bill because, it turns out, our title character is basically Charles Graner, the Abu Ghraib tor­turer who was sent to the military prison at Leavenworth for a few years after photos from Abu Ghraib went public in 2004.  Graner’s mother complained that “it’s the higher-ups that should be on trial. They let the little guys take the fall for them,” and Cirk agrees.  The mid-level officer who trained the torturers had faced no consequences and is now a consultant bringing military interrogation techniques to police departments, and Cirk has decided to make him pay.  When he tries to rope in Bill, Bill can see that Cirk is on the verge of throwing his life away à la Thom­as Crooks, and invites him to follow the path that led Bill away from a life of obsessive recrimination.  The problem is that Bill’s solution was to lose himself in the mind-numbing repetition of gambling: “seventy hands an hour, eight to twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week”.  That doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Nor does this movie.  I did watch it all the way to the end, but it felt like I’d already seen the better version (and I don’t mean First Reformed).  It was enough of a chore that I had to break it up into two sittings.  So here’s a coincidence for you.  When I saw that this movie was to a great extent about the legacy of Abu Ghraib, I thought, hey, that’s interesting⁠—I could imagine this movie coming out in 2006 or so, made as an immediate response to the Abu Ghraib scandal, and I could also imagine it coming out in 2021 if Hillary Clinton had been elected president in 2016, as the Bush/Cheney administration would still be considered the low point in modern American history and thus something we would still be poking at.  Instead, the rise of American fascism has eclipsed the failed neocon imperialist project as our big post-Cold War crisis.  To watch a movie about Abu Ghraib felt a little bit like watching a movie about Watergate now that we get scan­dals that should be bigger than Watergate several times a week.  But still, yeah, we were torturing people at Abu Ghraib and other black sites scattered across the globe, and while the movie spot­lights defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he wasn’t generally seen as the primary architect of U.S. policy in the ’00s.  Dick Che­ney was.  And when I started watching this movie, Dick Cheney was still alive.  When I finished it, he wasn’t.

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