Snowden

Last weekend, we had Sully, a docudrama that wisely did not play up the character of Chesley Sullenberger, and rightly made him out to be an ordinary man who made the right decision at the right time.  This weekend, we get Snowden, a docudrama that does the complete opposite on its subject, Edward Snowden.  The movie's sole purpose is to tell us how co-writer and director Oliver Stone feels about the guy, and how the filmmaker sees him as a misunderstood American hero who is being hunted down by his own government. It lionizes its subject matter, and doesn't let us make up our own minds.

Rather than give us a hard hitting film that covers the facts, Stone has chosen to mount his movie as a fawning cinematic love letter to Snowden, complete with a manipulative music score that sounds like something out of an Underdog Sports Team movie.  Whatever personal views you have on the man and whether you view him as a hero or a traitor to his country, you're not going to learn much here.  In fact, you're better off watching the Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour.  Stone apparently thinks so also, as he decides to use the making of that film as a framing device.  And even though the movie is completely in its corner, it never seems completely angry about what is happening to him.  It's too busy being your standard and conventional docudrama that breezes over the facts of the situation, and instead focuses an unnecessary amount of time on a love story subplot that has little to do with what we have come to see.  We've come to see Stone, one of the most famously angry filmmakers out there, get riled up.  What he gives us is your average Hollywood fluff piece that's about as deep as a Wikipedia article.

As the film opens, Edward Snowden (Jason Gordon-Levitt) has isolated himself in a hotel room in Hong Kong, as he prepares to tell his story to Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), Guardian newspaper reporter Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo).  He's arranged the meeting to give them information on the United States government's PRISM program, which allows them to hack private and personal conversations through telephone and the internet.  The movie then takes us back through his career, spanning from 2004 to around 2013.  Snowden is portrayed here as a mild mannered man who just happened to be a hacking genius, and quickly rose up the ranks in the CIA under the guide of a mentor (Rhys Ifans) and a somewhat odd code cracking genius within the CIA (Nicolas Cage, given very little to do here).  We are supposed to be watching how Snowden went from being a loyal patriot, to a paranoid wreck who distrusted his own government the deeper he got into working for them.  But again, the movie is not angry and nowhere near suspenseful enough to stir the sorts of feelings it wants to from its audience.

We learn little about what led him to leak all the information, take it public, and the events that led him to be exiled to Moscow, where he currently resides today.  Instead, the movie devotes over half of its running time to his relationship to his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), and the effect his job and him being forced to keep secrets had on their relationship.  However, their love story has no passion, and it's not just because of the fact that Gordon-Levitt and Woodley don't have that strong of chemistry up on the screen, though they certainly try.  Stone seems to have thrown their scenes together in so that Snowden will have something to do in the movie outside of work.  It pads out the movie, but it never really adds up to much.  It's almost as if Stone thinks there's not enough material to work with in the main story, so he tries to kill time with a romantic subplot where Lindsay generally acts as the all-supportive female figure, who only occasionally gets irritated with Snowden's secretive nature.  

The fact that I just mentioned that Stone has to pad out the story because there's not enough to work with tells you more than you need to know about why Snowden does not work.  It's not so much the fact that the movie was completely one-sided that irritated me, as I expected that. (Stone went on CNN a few days ago, expressing his views that President Obama should pardon Snowden and allow him to return to the U.S. without being arrested.) It's the fact that the movie itself is largely completely pedestrian and doesn't stir up any emotion about its subject.  Stone was once known for making movies that were defiant and unlike anything out there.  Now, he's just making garden variety Hollywood pieces, and it really is something you never could have seen coming given his earlier films like Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and JFK.  Instead of the fire and passion we got from those films, here we get a Hollywood-style romance and a lot of thriller cliches that would be right at home in your typical B-Movie espionage tale.

Snowden is an oddly cold and impersonal movie about a story that maybe should be more interesting than it is.  Or, maybe I'm right, and there's not not enough here.  Whatever the case, Stone has lost whatever once drove him to make movies, and is now just selling pre-packaged cinematic goods.  This isn't even one of the worst movies of the year, but it could easily be one of the most disappointing.

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