TORONTO – At the beginning of Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” a title card appears informing the viewer that this is a “a dramatization of actual events.” You’ve seen these disclaimers before in front of numerous biopics, but in this case it’s a very important caveat for anyone hoping to discover the true story behind Edward Snowden’s journey from CIA employee to arguably the most famous whistleblower on the planet. Despite the best intentions, “Snowden” is the latest poster child for what can go wrong when you make a Hollywood-ized version of someone’s life.
Based on the novels “The Snowden Files” by Luke Harding and “Time of the Octopus” by Anatoly Kucherena, the picture begins with a young, patriotic Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learning his tenure in the U.S. Army will be a short one after a doctor informs him after a bad airborne jump, that he might never walk again. Following a medical discharge, the movie skips ahead to his years as a CIA operative and programmer in Virginia where he meets the love of his life, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley, rescuing one clichéd romantic scene after another), and a cagey mentor who eventually becomes the embodiment of everything Snowden comes to detest about the government’s intelligence efforts (Rhys Ifans unable to escape the Bond villain trap). That mentor helps him land his first field assignment in Geneva where he learns disturbing details of the CIA’s digital surveillance operations and overall methods that give him pause even if his naiveté over the latter is somewhat hard to believe. Resigning from the CIA he works as a Dell contractor for the NSA (although Dell is strangely never mentioned) that finds him spending a number of years in Tokyo and Hawaii at different government facilities with a high security clearance. His frustration over the intelligence community’s digital spying efforts and cyber warfare tactics reach a point where he realizes if he doesn’t expose the illegal activity going on no one else will.
As the picture reveals the history leading up to Snowden’s actions it intercuts to a Hong Kong hotel room in 2013 where documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto, doing Greenwald no favors) and Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) have gathered to meet this unknown whistleblower. Poitras chronicled these few days in “Citizenfour” and it’s a constant reminder that Stone can’t escape that Oscar winning documentary’s imposing shadow.
One of the movie’s notable strong points, however, is that Stone is able to accomplish something many other filmmakers and news reports have had problems describing in an impactful way: the CIA program XKeyscore. In a series of scenes with Snowden and a rebellious CIA colleague (the winning Ben Schnetzer) Stone demonstrates just how the government was able to use XKeyscore to search millions of people’s E-mail and social media conversations as though they were using a simple Google search program. These searches allowed the intelligence community to create a web of social connections as though they were behind the wall of a more in-depth version of Facebook. Want to find a way to discredit a certain individual? XKeyscore can allow you to make numerous connections from the subject’s friends or family that the CIA could use against them. Even though it sounds like a fantastical plot point of a late ‘90s Jerry Bruckheimer thriller it’s quite real. And while the CG animation Stone uses to explain this will remind many of the opening credits of a Bryan Singer “X-Men” film it’s still powerfully effective.
The picture also does a more than adequate job of painting Snowden as a three-dimensional figure. Too often the press and politicians have portrayed him as either a liberating hero or an enemy of the state who has put innocent people’s lives at risk with little wiggle room in-between. “Snowden” the movie doesn’t make him a saint or a traitor. He’s clearly not the best boyfriend at times and he blatantly admits during his initial CIA interview that one of the reasons he applied is because he thought it would be “cool” to earn top-secret security clearance. But it’s hard not to sympathize after he has a seizure in the middle of a party and his friends and co-workers discover he has epilepsy (something he’s tried to keep private). Gordon-Levitt deserves much of the credit for making you root for Snowden (even when you might not want to) and his attempt to duplicate Snowden’s cadence becomes less jarring as the film goes on.
As a piece of filmed entertainment “Snowden” is certainly a watchable endeavor, but Stone and screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald’s script is often an odd mix of hero worship, conspiratorial thriller and cringe worthy dialogue (again, Woodley deserves significant kudos in this regard). Moreover, some of the screenplay’s creative liberties simply stretch the truth too much. Snowden has gone on record saying he went through “internal channels of dissent” to protest the NSA actions he believed were unconstitutional yet the movie insinuates he simply remained quiet because he feared the legal reprisals other whistleblowers had endured. And the film’s climactic moment, Snowden downloading the incriminating evidence on a hard drive is complete conjecture. Hey, they don’t call it a dramatization for nothing, do they?
Also complicating matters is the fact Stone’s direction and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle visuals give the film a studio gloss that is simply too slick to make the real life events feel grounded in any way. In fact — spoiler alert — until the real Snowden shows up you might think the movie was a complete work of fiction. That helps damper many of the questions the picture leaves unanswered (and there are a lot of them), but it also stifles any passion over the important revelations its hero risked his life for to bring to light. [C+]
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