Prospero | A leaky narrative

“Snowden” fails to give movie-goers the whole truth

What could have been a fascinating, multi-faceted biopic is instead a hagiography

By L.M.

IT IS easy to forget, watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt in “Snowden”, that it is the slight actor from “Third Rock from the Sun” and “Inception” on screen and not the former NSA contractor himself. So spookily does Mr Gordon-Levitt inhabit Edward Snowden’s v-neck t-shirts, imitate his voice, infiltrate his mannerisms, that he crosses the line from acting to impersonation. In any other film it might have been overkill. But in Oliver Stone’s story of the man behind the biggest leaks in recent history, it is only apt: “Snowden” is a film that may as well have been starred in and written and directed by Mr Snowden himself.

This should come as no huge surprise. Mr Stone has made a career of goading America. The government lies, it subverts, it kills; see “Nixon”, “W.”, “JFK”. The state is decayed and morally bankrupt: “Natural Born Killers”; “Wall Street”. No one was expecting a film painting Mr Snowden as a traitor.

Yet even allowing for dramatic license, “Snowden” is hagiography, devoid of nuance, unleavened by criticism, missing even a believable character arc. The best that Mr Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, his co-writer, muster is a flirtatious disagreement between Snowden and his future girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). Walking past an Iraq War protest in front of the White House, a young Edward argues against liberals and for the righteousness of the war. Lindsay disagrees. They kiss. Two hours later he is leaking untold gigabytes of information to the press.

This is a shame, for two reasons. The first is that it is simply a missed opportunity to tell a good story. It is well documented that the real-life Mr Snowden declared his love for his Walther P22, his disgust with the vibrant, varied Muslim population of east London and his belief in libertarian views in online forums over the years; the man who wrote those posts eventually leaking the NSA’s secrets makes for a much more dramatic transformation than that of an earnest patriot betrayed. Supporters of Mr Snowden’s actions are left to root for a cardboard cut-out of a hero. Detractors can point to yet another example of liberal bias. It is not incumbent on film-makers to tell the whole story, to include every nuance. But it is their duty to paying ticket-holders to tell at least an interesting one.

The second reason is that there is plenty of new material in here. Mr Snowden’s relationship with his girlfriend is fleshed out and forms an integral part of the story. His work on secret projects previously unrevealed adds fresh aspects to what is known about the NSA’s programmes. Yet Mr Snowden’s record of exaggerations (such as calling himself a “senior member of the intelligence community”) coupled with the fact that the revelations are used mostly as justifications for his leaks make even the new details suspect. Would it weren’t so.

It is not only Mr Stone’s sympathies that weaken “Snowden”. His treatment also lacks imagination. The film cuts between room 1014 at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, where in 2013 Mr Snowden met the journalists who would tell his story—Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill—and his backstory from 2004, when he joined the army, flunked out and began his slow rise up the ranks of the American intelligence community. Along the way he discovers just how much power he and his colleagues have, and just how little oversight there is to prevent them from them abusing it. In one particularly chilling scene, an NSA agent watches through a laptop webcam as a woman accused of absolutely nothing undresses in the privacy of her own home. It is perhaps the most effective moment of the film’s 134-minute running time. Yet other attempts to bring home this power—such as when another co-worker describes watching drone hits kill innocent parties—fall flat. As the old journalistic maxim goes, it is better to show than to tell.

And that is the flaw that is at the core of “Snowden”. In attempting to tell the story of Mr Snowden’s adult life, and also that of his revelations, and indeed that of American surveillance overreach, the film attempts to do too much, doing none effectively. To get a sense of the drama that accompanied the exposure of the NSA’s activities, watch Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary, “Citizenfour”, filmed largely in the Hotel Mira in 2013. For a lesson in the horrific moral decisions that soldiers and analysts must make when using drones, “Eye in the Sky” does the job. And to get a sense of Mr Snowden’s character his own words may be best—he has written thousands of words on Ars Technica, a tech website, and given hundreds of interviews, not least to Ms Poitras and to the Guardian. Indeed Mr Snowden appears in cameo towards the end of Mr Stone’s film. It is an acknowledgement of the complicity of the film-makers in the one-sided nature of what could have been a fascinating, multi-faceted story.

“Snowden” is out now in America and screening in Britain from October 15th

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