Hollywood director Doug Liman broke into the mainstream with the surprise hit Swingers in 1996. The film starred Jon Favreau as the a painfully awkward Mike and Vince Vaughn as the exuberantly confident Trent, as the pals navigated love, loneliness, and — for Mike — the freeing power of dance in hard-luck Los Angeles.
Liman went on to make The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon and other big Hollywood films — working with leading man icons like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt (Mr. and Mrs. Smith). So he knows something about alpha male behavior.
Liman also made a documentary called Justice that few people have seen. There are a mere seven reviews of the film by critics on Rotten Tomatoes, where it has an audience score of “No Score Yet.”
Liman’s Justice examines the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that played such a large role in Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation hearings. Notably, after the film’s 2023 Sundance premiere, Justice — Liman’s first documentary, after more than 30 years in the movie business — pretty much disappeared.
Doug Liman (Bourne Identity) directed an incredible documentary about Kavanaugh, that got bought and buried.
Someone should really look into that…https://t.co/Sw4QLHTgRR
— Stephanie “LB” (@LincolnsBible) October 8, 2024
Those seven reviews include one by Daily Beast critic Nick Shager, who wrote that the film “makes up for a relative dearth of explosive revelations by lucidly recounting this ugly chapter in recent American history.”
That “dearth of explosive revelations” surrounding Kavanaugh’s conduct was no accident, according to new charges by United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who this week released findings that the FBI investigation into Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh were hindered by Trump White House interference.
Whitehouse asserted that the same happened with similar allegations made by Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Debbie Ramirez, whose story is also central to Liman’s film.
In 2018, I pledged to Christine Blasey Ford that I’d keep digging until we got to the bottom of the Trump White House’s shameful confirmation process for Justice Kavanaugh.
I did, and today we have some updates. https://t.co/2Bx1cZzt6L
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 8, 2024
With Whitehouse’s announcement, lawyers for Blasey Ford wrote: “The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth.”
Where is Liman’s film then, in the current streaming world of all things available? Variety‘s review makes the point that Liman’s effort might have lacked distribution because it is “one-sided” and fails to produce a “smoking gun” — yet plenty of one-sided media is streamed into homes each day.
And if there is no “smoking gun,” there is what Variety described as Justice making “the clear case that Kavanaugh perjured himself during his confirmation when he claimed only to have learned of Ramirez’s accusation when he read about it in The New Yorker.”
In a year of major revelations about the Supreme Court and its potential ethics violations — a top issue for the Judiciary Committee member Whitehouse — there is ample reason to believe that a broad showing of Liman’s film could impact public opinion about a SCOTUS already under the microscope.
There is also, of course, ample reason to believe that plenty of people with money and litigious lawyers on speed dial would presumably prefer that this microscope be unplugged.