Everybody Must Get Stoned

E ALL KNEW AN EDWARD SNOWDEN biopic was coming. From the moment the NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower first opened his laptop to a bunch of awestruck journalists three years ago, the countdown was on — the only questions were who would play him and who would direct. The answers to those are, respectively, Joseph Gordon-levitt and Oliver Stone. And as it turns out, Oliver Stone might be the only director in Hollywood truly capable of adapting such a fraught and delicate period of history — a period so recent and relevant it still kind of stings. That is, if the right Oliver Stone shows up.

WIn an ideal world, Stone should have made this movie 30 years ago (aside from the inconvenient fact that Snowden was 13 years old then, but you get the point). Forget the guy who made the toothless W or the frenetic but meaningless Savages. Snowden’s story calls for late-1980s Oliver Stone, the kind of simmering all-american anger that helped inspire Platoon, his blood-soaked meditation on the ravages of the Vietnam War (Stone is a Vietnam vet) that earned him a Best Picture Oscar in 1986 and a place in the pantheon of great American directors. Platoon kicked off a decade-long stretch of bracing, vital and intensely “American” movies — including Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK — that helped return a critical, paranoid, authority-challenging voice to the mainstream, something that hadn’t been around since the New Hollywood days of the early 1970s. Stone showed us the flawed avarice, want, and narcissism of the winners that society championed, while teaching us to root for the weirdos, underdogs, and lost causes. Gordon Gekko and Ron Kovic are both products of the same culture, and are both worth understanding, however disparate their points of view.

But Stone’s provocateur approach to history, be it the past of 1963 or 2013, doesn’t hold the same sway it once did. When he turns his eye toward history, he has a habit of cherry picking the facts he includes in his films. Once that was considered controversial, edgy. Now, weaned on a few decades of Stonestyle storytelling, we’ve learned to crave narrative over accuracy. His twisted history lessons no longer seem so shocking.

In some ways, the problem is the subject itself. When it comes to Snowden, we already have counterintuitive or countercultural opinions of our own. How could we not? His story arrived via the Internet along with immediate social media-supplied context, analysis, and a seething rush of opinions (to say nothing of the existing cinematic retellings, like the excellent documentary Citizenfour). Stone’s power once came from delving into the depths of a story to find something new to show us, to confront us with. He can’t do that with Snowden because there’s nothing new to show. Maybe in 1991 people in the mainstream didn’t know the extent of conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’S assassination. Today you could ask your mom about Edward Snowden and she’d send you to her livestream of one of his keynotes.

So while Snowden isn’t exactly a revelation, it does contain at least one insight. It does something that Stone is uniquely skilled at, something that’s been a constant throughout his work: he helps us empathize with his subject. With Joseph Gordon-levitt turning in a solid, if slightly stiff, performance, Stone puts us in the mind of a thoughtful, complex, real person who upended the entire US intelligence community with what he believed to be a wholly patriotic act. We all care, one way or the other, about what Snowden did. But only Oliver Stone could make us care about him as a man. And that might be the most important take there is.

Oliver Stone is one of America’s greatest chroniclers of uncomfortable recent history. His latest subject, Edward Snowden, is perfect for him