Even if the story presented in Snowden were 100 percent fiction, it would still be a fascinating tale to watch unfold. As directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, SNOWDEN is one of the most intense, thought-provoking and paranoia-inducing films you’ll see all year. It’s also one of the most biased, hero-worshipping pieces he’s ever made, but that doesn’t in any way take away from its impact: a significant telling of an event whose ramifications are still being felt today.
What also doesn’t truly matter when it comes to whether or not you’ll enjoy this movie is how you feel about what Edward Snowden did. Sure, you may get angry at Stone for glorifying this man who copied and leaked classified information about illegal government surveillance of American citizens, but Stone takes us by the scruff of the neck and forces us to look at the bigger-picture issues that prompted Snowden to do what he did. It’s as aggressive and interesting filmmaking as Stone has done in many years (probably since 1995’s NIXON), and the resulting work at least makes the effort to dig deeper and point fingers (if you think Stone wouldn’t dare point fingers at the Obama administration, think again).
As long as you go into SNOWDEN remembering that it isn’t meant to take the place of a great documentary like the Oscar-winning CITIZENFOUR (moments from which are meticulously re-created here), you’ll likely find it easy to get lost in the intrigue and perilously mind-bending thought processes going on in our intelligence-gathering communities. Edward Snowden (played with a mastery of understated enthusiasm and smarts by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) began life as a conservative wanting to serve his country in the military, but after an injury sidelined him permanently, he turned his skills as a programmer into a job at the CIA, under the training of the perhaps too deviously played Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans) and the mentorship of old-school tech expert Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage), and just like that, the angel and devil are placed on Snowden’s shoulders.
Snowden’s ideas help him rise through the ranks quickly, but the more he discovers about the depths of surveillance going on both abroad and within our borders, the more distraught he becomes. After a somewhat botched field assignment with co-worker Agent Geneva (Timothy Olyphant), Snowden retires and eventually lands a job as a contractor for the NSA, where he is given access to an unfathomable amount of data that he probably shouldn’t have.
The burden of this kind of knowledge, takes its toll on his personal life as well, especially with this girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who is portrayed as a complex and independent spirit who is nevertheless truly concerned about the mental and physical impact that Snowden’s job is having on him.
With Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald’s screenplay (based on the books “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” by Luke Harding, and “Time of the Octopus” by Anatoly Kucherena), Snowden’s thought process is ever shifting and evolving, and it’s genuinely refreshing to watch a character on screen whose morals are changing before our eyes. It’s stressful and Gordon-Levitt’s conviction and steely reserve sells it. He also paints Snowden as a genuinely likable man, capable of hanging with just about anyone. Some of my favorite moments in the film are when he and his fellow NSA contractors sit around talking shop. Lakeith Lee Stanfield (SHORT TERM 12, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON) and Scott Eastwood show up in these scenes, and the group sell the dynamic at play in the most secret of government agencies, where even casual conversation can come back to bite you in the ass.
Stone makes it clear that it wasn’t just one factor that pushed Snowden to do what he did. The result was cumulative, and he was fairly certain what the consequences would be. The sequences that mirror moments in CITIZENFOUR are exceptionally well crafted, with Snowden and three journalists—including Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo, playing the director of the documentary), lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), and The Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson sporting a brilliant Scottish accent)—in a Hong Kong hotel room taking every precaution not to get caught, as the writers prepare to receive illegal documents.
A theme that appears frequently in SNOWDEN is this idea of how casually a secret can be found out or, almost worse, get left unprotected in a high-security environment. One such incident early on in Snowden’s career occurs when a chill co-worker, Gabriel (Ben Schnetzer), allows Snowden to watch him remotely turn on a laptop camera using a program that Snowden didn’t even know existed. The incident triggers something in Snowden that infects the way he behaves at home with Lindsay, and it begins the chipping-away at his justification of government policies to something far more questioning (at least internally). With each new job (which is usually accompanied by a boost in security clearance), Snowden learns more, and it crushes his old belief system.
The most frustrating thing about Stone’s telling of Snowden’s story is that it’s missing a satisfying conclusion. Every aspect of the film feels immediate. Stone is presenting us with stories of the past; these are stories and issues still being figured out today. The impact of what Snowden did and the consequences of his actions are still being analyzed and figured out, and that reality gives SNOWDEN a real charge. You don’t even have to embrace Stone’s hero-building tactics, but it’s impossible to sit through this movie and not be intrigued and curious about Edward Snowden as a man willing to be in exile in Moscow for years while his country figures out what to do with him.
