In August, documentarian Laura Poitras described meeting Snowden director Oliver Stone to Vanity Fair. “She recalled that when they met for the first time in 2014, Stone asked her to delay the release of her film, because his ‘would be the real movie.’”
It is not. Snowden is not the real movie. Poitras’ Citizenfour is the real movie.
Snowden is a relationship drama without specificity, with a romance that’s little more than a coal cart for dragging forward Edward Snowden’s political evolution. Snowden is also an espionage thriller that inflates file transfer progress bars into action sequences, never quite willing to admit that nothing about Edward Snowden’s document leaking is thrilling on traditional blockbuster vectors. Finally, Snowden is itself a documentary explainer of the value in Snowden’s leaks, just one that’s too hampered by its narrative form to do much more than breathlessly spill code names and technical explanations in spare moments.
Snowden uses Snowden’s meeting with The Guardian ’s Ewen MacAskill, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald (at the time also writing for The Guardian) and documentarian Laura Poitras as the frame story for flashbacks to Snowden’s days at the CIA and as an NSA contractor from Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. But while Snowden’s Hong Kong hotel room felt like the airless, suffocating center of an international firestorm in Citizenfour, Snowden stages it more like a medal podium. We know the leaks are inevitable, and Snowden acts as if the cast does too (excepting one outbreak of wrathful journalistic integrity from Glenn Greenwald, here portrayed by Star Trek’s Zachary Quinto). As Snowden walks from the NSA’s Hawaiian operations center with an SD card in a Rubik’s Cube, at the very point of the spear, he shares meaningful eye contact with two fellow employees. Somehow, both have already felt the shockwave of import cascading back from the future and offer their awed respects.
Snowden isn’t bad, just silly, and it’s the silliness of earnest intentions writ large. “One man can stop the motor of the world,” Ayn Rand wrote and Oliver Stone later took to heart. The most another human can offer this filmic Snowden is a slow evolution of political liberalism, culminating in the prosaic depiction of two people excited to watch Barack Obama win the presidency.
All that said, Snowden gets a lot right. Though it can’t provide a fraction of the chilling insight or understanding of Citizenfour, it is surprisingly dense with details from the NSA’s international spying regime. There won’t be many revelations for people who follow the news closely, but for those who paid less attention to the NSA leaks in 2013, Snowden provides a decent overview.
It’s the personal side of the story where Snowden suffers most, the human relationships lacking the detailed and labyrinthine truth of the information he leaked. Stone doesn’t seem to understand Edward Snowden all that well, at one point rattling off a list of his favorite movies and books rather than grappling with Snowden’s genuine nerdiness and online origin story. The real Edward Snowden is a D&D playing, Ars Technica commenting, Japanophile Final Fantasy gamer, more adept at memes than the cooking, hunting, socializing character Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays (well, I should add).
Shailene Woodley, as Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills, is handed more than most movie spy lovers, but mainly serves to guide Snowden’s evolution from technical genius / political neophyte, to technical genius / whistleblower of patriotic conscience. Unfortunately, Snowden is only made dynamic by starting him off an infant. The Snowden that enters CIA training under the cynical Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans) and downtrodden Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage) is a political child, the entire concept of government cynicism or citizen distrust flying over his head so that he may be educated by the intelligence agency running amok around him.
The resolute Snowden, the one we revisit in the hotel, has achieved the status of sainthood. The journalists who masterfully steered the initial waves of NSA disclosures are, lo, but the instruments by which Snowden’s great works are spread throughout the world. Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), in particular, is shrunken to supportive smiles, more sainted mother than daring filmmaker. As Snowden prepares to leave the hotel and await his flights to Ecuador (it somehow always needs repeating that Snowden didn’t flee to Russia, but was stranded there by the U.S. government), he conducts his Last Supper, intoning that all files have been expunged from his computer: it’s in the hands of his apostles now. And then there’s Snowden’s last moment, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt transforms into the man himself, Edward Snowden, staring pensively to one side as his form is bathed in ethereal light.
Here’s the thing: Edward Snowden deserves this treatment and this platform. In shameful rebuke to the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International’s campaign to pressure Obama into pardoning Snowden, the U.S. House of Representatives’ intelligence committee issued a bipartisan condemnation of Snowden’s whistleblowing, calling for his extradition and trial (Barton Gellman dismantles some of the lies therein). Despite the overwhelming illegalities, despicable overreach and international chicanery revealed by his leaks, despite the former Attorney General Eric Holder calling Snowden’s actions a “public service” and despite the worldwide good Snowden performed, it remains the policy of this country to jail him under the monstrous Espionage Act of 1917. That his praises are sung on such an immense platform as the sprawling square footage of the world’s movie screens is a remarkable and heartening development.
But it’s not the real movie.
