Snowden [Review by Haus]

In Snowden, triple Academy Award winner Oliver Stone plants his chips definitively on the side of the whistleblower and goes all in. This is a long (2 hours 18 minutes), clean, finely executed study of Edward Snowden’s adult life as it led up to and included his publicizing of U.S. government secrets in 2013. If you already lionize Snowden for his actions, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.

From a documentary standpoint, Citizenfour already did a terrific job telling a central portion of Snowden’s story. There, journalists and a documentary filmmaker met with Snowden in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong in 2013 (with camera rolling!) and captured the story live as it developed. Citizenfour is a truly riveting piece of filmmaking and delivers a powerful message, notwithstanding the sometimes nerdy aloofness of its always-articulate deep-voiced messenger. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2015 (just as I said it should, chuff chuff).

But Citizenfour was understandably limited mainly to those conversations in the Mira, leaving many questions unanswered and Oliver Stone with a large canvas indeed. He uses it well, if a bit slowly, following high-school-dropout Snowden from his aborted special forces bid through his CIA entrance interviews, training, and into various posts as a government contractor working inside the NSA and related agencies. We’re introduced to Snowden as a genius programmer and darling of his CIA instructors, as a boyfriend (albeit not a terrific one), and briefly, as a CIA field agent. We see his first exposure to the U.S. government’s broad data collection through NSA use of the XKEYSCORE search interface, and we see him being paranoid not just in his work but also at home. (Snowden certainly has a strange relationship with secrets. To what extent this is justified is, just as in Citizenfour, a question you’ll have to answer yourself.) We also see what happened when Snowden left the Mira Hotel, a welcome follow-on to the documentary.

In all, Stone does a serviceable job telling the story of how Snowden’s leaked data got out and what happened thereafter, though it’s dramatized to a degree and has the color saturation dialed way up. Stone also suggests Snowden may have had help (or at least support and tacit endorsement) from his coworkers inside the NSA. I might be more inclined to believe this if the film weren’t so gung-ho about how right and just Snowden is. I smell some whitewash.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers a truly amazing performance and an uncanny imitation of Snowden (so much so, apparently, that even Snowden’s own parents told him so) and the always-watchable Shailene Woodley plays Lindsay Mills, his decade-long girlfriend. Both are good actors and they do good work here, carrying this film even through its slower parts. Nicolas Cage makes a mercifully brief appearance as a CIA instructor; Scott Eastwood appears at times, carrying on his Suicide Squad practice of looking better than he performs. And while I initially cringed a bit to see Zachary Quinto (Spock in the recent Star Trek films) cast as journalist Glenn Greenwald, I quickly realized first that they do in fact resemble one another and, second and more important, that Quinto is truly excellent in the part. Quinto shows us a side of Greenwald that Citizenfour left out, and hammed up or not, it’s a good addition.

Old Oliver gets a bit dramatic elsewhere as well, like when he chooses to portray an old CIA boss (Rhys Ifans) as a giant disembodied face on a wall-size screen, dwarfing Snowden and hammering home in no uncertain terms the Orwellian comparison Stone wants to make; or when he includes a slick CGI animation as a backdrop for his “we’re all in their database” message.

But what Stone doesn’t do is carefully scrutinize the actual surveillance practices of the government. Sure, he includes some box-top quotables like “terrorism is the excuse, this is about social control” on one side and “secrecy is security and security is victory” on the other, but a careful analysis this is not. And this is a shortfall, because at its core, Snowden’s revelation was an important issue that does merit such scrutiny. Again, for this, I send you to Citizenfour. These two should come as a boxed set.

A brief aside: One criticism that’s often leveled at Snowden is that he erred by going public, and should instead have taken his concerns up internally with the NSA general counsel or his bosses. What such complaints fail to recognize is the long history of people within the system who tried to do exactly that and were both unsuccessful and punished for it. Thomas Drake, a far more senior NSA figure than Snowden ever was, tried this route and was stripped of his pay and criminally charged–all while hamstrung and unable to publicly reveal the basis for his concern. Snowden, such as he is, does not stand alone, but rather is shown as the downstream manifestation of a system trying repeatedly to cough up its secrets.

And another: Snowden’s palpable frustration with the standard retort to his revelation — namely, the “I don’t have anything to hide, so government monitoring doesn’t bother me” — is quite rightly placed. As Snowden himself has said, the whole “if you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to worry” idea originated in Nazi propaganda and is equivalent to saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you yourself have nothing to say. Haven’t fact checked the former, but the latter is right.

One more: Peter Gabriel sings the closing credits tune (“Veil“), a chill and haunting little melody that sounds decent until you stop to listen to the words. These are perhaps the most painfully obvious lyrics of all time. It’s like a five year old describing the film, a real drink in the face of allegory and lyrical subtlety. You’ve been warned.

All told, I enjoyed Snowden. It’s not the tell-all on government spying that some folks will wish for; rather, it’s the backstory of Snowden himself, how he came to do what he did, and what’s happened since. I found it fascinating and nicely done, and more than that, any talk of Snowden’s secrets is particularly relevant today as we teeter on the brink of a Trump presidency. With the massive infrastructure of social monitoring and control already in place, some new leader could flip the switch and get, as Stone’s Snowden says, “turnkey tyranny.” This, suddenly, is a real concern.

Haus Verdict: Stunningly good mimicry by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Long and not Stone’s masterpiece, but a relevant and well-made movie and a worthwhile complement to Citizenfour. 

Snowden opens Friday, September 16. 

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