Movie Review: ‘Snowden’

Oliver Stone

Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower

SNOWDEN Directed by Oliver Stone  

Biography, Drama, Thriller  R  2h 14m

Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

By Meg Felling and AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER 1:15

The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews “Snowden” By Meg Felling and AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER on Publish Date September 15, 2016. Photo by JüRgen Olczyk/Open Road Films, via Associated Press...

Like those young men in a hurry, Edward falls under the sway of two antithetical father figures, a silky apparatchik played by Rhys Ifans, and an unbuttoned renegade played by Nicolas Cage. Drawn to intelligence work out of a sincere desire to serve his country, Edward is not immune to other attractions of the job. He likes the intrigue, the money (especially after he becomes a private contractor) and the feeling of being part of a select group of insiders who know how things really work.

But he is not a figure of operatic, tragic ambition in the mold of Richard M. Nixon, Jim Morrison or Alexander the Great (at least as Mr. Stone imagined them). Nerdy in aspect and phlegmatic in manner, Edward never takes a drink or chases a skirt. (His girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, is played by Shailene Woodley.) And “Snowden” is, by Mr. Stone’s standards, a strikingly sober film. Restraint shows in both the filmmaking and the politics. There are very few wild, bravura visual flights and not much in the way of wild conspiracymongering. Edward is a rational, ethical creature — “responsibility” is one of his favorite words — and the movie takes pains to be reasonable. Its basic argument about government data-collection would not be out of place on the Op-Ed page of this or any other newspaper. And its dialogue and pacing would work just fine on television.

By OPEN ROAD FILMS 2:31

By OPEN ROAD FILMS on Publish Date September 15, 2016. Image courtesy of Internet Video Archive. Watch in Times Video »
Maybe Mr. Stone has mellowed, or maybe the world has caught up with him. What used to be paranoia — the idea, say, that your electronic appliances are spying on you — looks nowadays like blunt realism. It can also seem as if the physical world, that bloody, sex-infused battleground of the self where previous Stone heroes have raged and fought, had been displaced by a more abstract zone of codes and algorithms. Edward passes from one realm to the other when an injury ends his career as a United States Army Ranger. “There are lots of ways to serve your country,” the doctor tells him, and soon enough, his bosses at the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. are explaining that the real war is being waged on computer and cellular networks.

Mr. Stone, well served by his cinematographer, the digital wizard Anthony Dod Mantle, and the composers Craig Armstrong and Adam Peters, evokes the chilly colorations and spooky undertones of our technological reality. The Hong Kong hotel room where Edward meets with Ms. Poitras (Melissa Leo) and the journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) is an eerie futuristic box. Snowden’s workplaces in Geneva, Tokyo and Oahu are hives full of glowing screens and whispered jargon.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley in “Snowden.” Credit Open Road Films
But while the script, which the director wrote with Kieran Fitzgerald, dutifully footnotes the more abstruse references — and explains the mechanics of surveillance with admirable clarity — Mr. Stone remains an old-school humanist, a poet of flesh and blood rather than a deep thinker about technology or politics. Nearly all of his films are ultimately about taking the measure of a man, and “Snowden” is most effective as a character study. As ever, Mr. Stone’s interest in women is limited. They provide pictorial variety and emotional complication, challenging and humanizing the heroes as the story requires. Ms. Woodley has more screen time than Sissy Spacek in “J.F.K.” or Joan Allen in “Nixon,” but she is, in effect, portraying an updated version of the loyal, long-suffering, uncomprehending wife.

Still, the relationship between Lindsay and Edward is the key to the film, since it establishes what is at stake for the hero as he faces the conflicting demands of love and duty. It also affirms that he is a nice, normal, humble guy, neither a zealot nor an egomaniac. Not everyone will agree with this — Donald J. Trump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all prominent nonmembers of the Edward Snowden fan club — but “Snowden” makes its case with skill and discretion.

At times, I found myself wishing that it would go further — that it would feel angrier, crazier, more frightening. But that would have made it easier to shake, and perhaps also to dismiss. This movie won’t necessarily dazzle or enrage you, and I’m not sure that it wants to. What it wants — what Mr. Snowden himself always claims to have wanted — is to bother you, to fill you with doubt about the good intentions of those who gather your data and tell you it’s for your own protection.

“Snowden” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Dark secrets, strong language and a trip to a strip club in the interests of national security. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

Source:Agencies & ENB