TOO SOON FOR SNOWDEN
Stone’s movie is relevant but lacks narrative bite, writes Chris Knight.
The world needs more Edward Snowden movies. The question is whether it needs Oliver Stone’s Snowden movie.
On the one hand, the case has been already been well documented by Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning 2014 documentary. On the other, Snowden’s whistleblower narrative, and the illegal government surveillance programs that engendered it, have made their way into popcorn movies as varied as Captain America, Fast & Furious 7, Spectre and The Dark Knight.
Somewhere in the middle falls this dramatization, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a weird accent that sounds like he inhaled whatever the opposite of helium is. The film finds the patriotic Snowden enlisting in the Marines post-9/11, but kept out of the field by a bad leg. (He breaks it by, of all things, falling out of bed.)
Snowden counters by joining intelligence, where he quickly discovers it takes all kinds. There’s an oddly subdued Nicolas Cage providing a handy history of code machines and covert communications. And there’s Rhys Ifans as his boss and mentor, leading Snowden down the rabbit hole of spy craft, a messy business that seems at times like a ramped-up version of a fraternity hazing ritual.
“Secrecy is security, and security is victory,” Ifans’ character tells him at one point. But it’s precisely this kind of circular dialogue that, while it sounds great rolling off the actors’ tongues, robs Snowden of much of its narrative bite.
It doesn’t help that Stone chooses to downplay many of the main characters. Shailene Woodley as Snowden’s girlfriend has little to do other than roll her eyes and wonder why he seems so shy about having his picture taken. And the journalists to whom Snowden unburdened himself in Hong Kong before fleeing to Russia (Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson) are similarly underutilized, even as the film uses their hotel-room meetings as a framing device.
Perhaps it’s an issue of time. Stone’s most powerful political films — Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon — were all made many years after the events they depicted. The George Bush biopic, W., in comparison, was released when the president was still in office. Documentary thrives on immediacy; drama chokes on it.
We haven’t heard the last of this tale.
Stone’s take may not be the best chapter, but it’s still a relevant episode.