Snowden Review

7.5 out of 10

Cast:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden

Shailene Woodley as Lindsay Mills

Melissa Leo as Laura Poitras

Zachary Quinto as Glenn Greenwald

Tom Wilkinson as Ewen MacAskill

Rhys Ifans as Corbin O’Brian

Ben Schnetzer as Gabriel Sol

LaKeith Lee Stanfield as Patrick Haynes

Scott Eastwood as Trevor James

Timothy Olyphant as CIA Agent Geneva

Bhasker Patel as Marwan Al-Kirmani

Nicolas Cage as Hank Forrester

Joely Richardson as Janine Gibson

Ben Chaplin as Robert Tibbo

Edward Snowden as Himself

Directed by Oliver Stone

Snowden Review:

As we’ve seen much of recently, complex subjects are both the great bane and great ally of film. On the one hand, explaining a lengthy and detailed subject within a framework which just barely has the time to fully investigate a short story seems like the definition of a fool’s errand. On the other hand, the audience reach such a well explained idea can have is beyond tempting and ultimately what the subject needs. The attempt to gain one and avoid the other is an incredible upward climb for any interested filmmaker.

It’s likely Edward Snowden (Gordon-Levitt) felt the same way when first joining the Central Intelligence Agency after an injury ended his Special Forces career. There, under the tutelage of a Lucifer-like mentor (a magnificent Ifans), he applies his largely self-taught brain to the modern problems of cryptology and digital espionage. Working at the bleeding edge of digital espionage and cryptography, Snowden soon finds himself not just listening in on the nation’s enemies but its friends, and sometimes worse than that.

Gordon-Levitt offers one of his best performances despite the overt choice to continue separating his real-life persona from his screen self by affecting a deep, almost monotone voice which doesn’t particularly sound like the real Snowden. But it’s also not the point either and quickly goes by the way side as he digs into Snowden’s path as a conservative patriot suddenly faced with what his country actually does versus what it says it does.

It has elements of fantasy of the “if only we could show conservatives the truth” variety, but it is bolstered by events which actually happened and Stone mostly staying out of his own way and letting that truth spill out. Calling it a political Oliver Stone movie is just another way of calling it an Oliver Stone movie, but rather than lecturing, or letting a character lecture, he sits back and lets events play out. Which means Snowden is less about what he did and more about who he was when he did what he did, which would not be a problem if the film was not ultimately about what he was doing and why we should be concerned about.

It is a natural turn to take in order to both draw an audience in and to avoid potentially dry technical exposition, but it also robs the film of its greatest potential achievement. Explaining a complex idea in a naturally reductive medium requires creating the most elegant form for the information which, once done, can be easily passed down over and over with fewer errors during transmission.

Avoiding that because of the difficulty level involved may reduce the possibility of fatal flaws, but it lowers the ceiling on how good the film can really be and Stone makes that choice early. As Snowden becomes more experienced, he loses the ability to ignore that the Agency (and by extension the US Government) has taken the reaction to 9/11 to not only protect itself against current terrorist threats but against all potential threats in the future.

Stone and his film are at their best in these moments suggesting that 9/11 unleashed this portion of the modern government as a simultaneously rational and irrational reaction to the original attack.

It’s easy enough to understand why Snowden is concerned and what he is concerned about, but considering how technical what the NSA was doing was and how important the explanation of that is to the point of the film, it seems to require more than a Hollywood gloss. Codenames and programming jargon are thrown around the way experienced professionals would, but basic explanation is left aside much of the time potentially leaving the layman in the lurch.

It’s not helped that Snowden by the nature of what he does has no one to talk to, not even his long suffering girlfriend Lindsay (Woodley). It does at least give actress Shailene Woodley some of the first really adult material she’s had to play and shows off her future even if she gets little to do in Snowden itself.

The rest of the cast is less fortunate with actors randomly cast to and against type. Outside of Ifans (who steals every scene he gets), most of the supporting actors fade away. Much of that is because of the need to show how patriotic concerns become corrupted by banal internecine political feuds with spies and administrators willing to destroy lives, disrupt power grids and blow up the world around them for their own petty aggrandizement.

This creates for the most part a faceless mob of supporting actors behind Gordon-Levitt (who is by necessity in every scene) who mostly don’t stand out except for the wrong reasons. Nicolas Cage as a wizened CIA instructor is basically Nicolas Cage no matter what he’s doing or saying, but at least what he’s saying is frequently interesting.

By comparison, the flashes to 2013 and the pivotal meeting with Laura Poitras (Leo) and Glenn Greenwald (Quinto), which revealed Snowden’s knowledge to the public and serve as a framework for the film, are almost parodies of these kinds of films. They tend to devolve into soap opera with characters yelling at each other about how the world is about to end and they’re out of time and, while much of that paranoia is entirely justified, it still doesn’t stop it from sounding like a made-for-TV special.

What flaws it does have does not disqualify the film from its attempt at grasping hard subject matter, but it does keep it from reaching its full potential. It’s best and most obvious use is as a short hand for those who’ve never seen the actual Laura Poitras documentary about the actual Ed Snowden’s actual meeting with Greenwald and the exposure of the NSA wiretapping program.

Ironically, in both Citizenfour and Snowden the man himself keeps telling his chroniclers that what they need to focus on is the story, not him, but the need to create a human element for consumption keeps making filmmakers forget that. Still, there’s a lot of good to be said for Snowden, Gordon-Levitt’s performance on top, and while it’s far from perfect, it is important and important to remember what’s past is not past at all.