‘Snowden’ guilty of betraying its audience
Oliver Stone’s latest biopic is routine, covers no new ground
Whatever you think of Edward Snowden as a person, his story is tailor-made for the likes of director Oliver Stone and his conspiracy-theory lens.
Though it’s well acted and the director puts several welcome thriller touches on the inherently dull computer world, Snowden ( out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) just doesn’t have the signature chutzpah or engrossing nature that Stone’s infused in his more highprofile and controversial projects ( Platoon, JFK, Natural Born
Killers). Snowden’s a polarizing whistleblower portrayed as an American hero here, but in too pedestrian a fashion for such a hot-button topic. And the movie seems at times as awkward as its brainiac subject.
It takes a little time to get used to star Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s robotic monotone as Snowden, whose tale is framed by the infamous 2013 leaking of classified government documents with the help of The Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (an ultra-intense Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), as well as documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo).
Stone comes back to that secret meeting in Hong Kong over and over as they weigh the risk and fight with editors about the international fire storm they’re about to unleash. And in flashbacks, the filmmaker fills in the previous decade, beginning with Snowden joining the CIA after injuries cut short a Special Forces military career. A smart man who wants to serve his country, Snowden continues working for the government on various classified surveillance programs, domestic and abroad, and begins to question his superiors’ methods when it comes to citizens’ civil liberties. So he does something about it, even though his actions pretty much make him America’s most wanted.
Anybody who’s watched the nightly news in the past few years knows what happened next, and
Snowden doesn’t add anything truly special to the infamous narrative. Stone ratchets up the paranoia with Snowden worrying about people coming after him and his free-spirited, pole-dancing girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), and the increasing tension leads to him sneaking out the classified files that would ultimately get him in hot water. In the end, though, the most memorable aspect of the film is arguably the Rubik’s Cube that Stone includes as a combination stress-relief/spycraft device for Snowden.
Gordon-Levitt infuses his character with a cool calmness that gets gradually shattered over two hours. Stone ups the personal stakes in Snowden by putting Lindsay in the middle of this mishegas, and both have to figure out if their relationship is worth the potential danger. There are some effective lighthearted scenes as Lindsay tries to take candid pictures of a smiling Snowden, and those help in humanizing the polarizing character. But Gordon-Levitt has more natural chemistry with Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage as a couple of idiosyncratic CIA men than he does with Woodley.
Dealing with such a controversial figure and story, Stone keeps the movie from getting overly political. But the one thing that most undermines Snowden is there’s a better version of it: On the whole, the drama just isn’t nearly as gripping as Poitras’ 2014 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour that featured Snowden. (He also gets a cameo in Stone’s film.)