SNOWDEN
Snowden literally ends with a standing ovation. It’s a case of wishful thinking for filmmaker Oliver Stone, who mounts his biopic of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a rousing tribute to an unexpected patriot. Wielding his trademarked sledgehammer subtlety, Stone delivers Snowden as if the film will be submitted evidence in a campaign for a potential Presidential Pardon; his film a 134-minute public-relations corrective for a demonised dissident.
This standing ovation on close doesn’t come from anything Stone has (along with co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald) scripted; I’m sorry to say, cliché-lovers, it’s not the silent-room-broken-by-one-solitary-handclap-which-soon-grows-to-a-round-of-thunderous-applause trope at work. Instead, the standing ovation comes from a real-life audience sitting in on a live-on-stage Skype interview with the real Edward Snowden, rising to their feet in response to the presence of its interviewee; for all he did, what he stands for.
In Snowden, Stone clearly sees his subject as a Great American Hero; sees his actions —leaking documents detailing the technological surveillance apparatus erected by the US government to spy on not just its enemies, but its own citizens— as a work of heroism. Which, like, fair enough. But its portrait of heroism is made to hew to an action-thriller template, with its standing-ovation climax framed as if a happy ending. This old-fashioned tone of cinematic pamphleteering taps into the binary morality that makes motion-pictures pat. Here, Snowden is a Great White Male doing Great Things, but for all his derring-do and good-deed-do-ing, reaching for an ‘up’ ending feels like it’s a stretch. The NSA leaks showed that we’re dwelling in a data-mining dystopia, but, evidently, didn’t actually effect any change. Aren’t you glad you know you’re living in a surveillance state? Stand up and clap!
The appearance of the real-life Snowden for the grand finale is a simple gesture —here’s the Great Man himself!— that gets complicated. Does it really just amount to a boast that the film was made with Snowden’s co-operation? Is it just —as with the recent Sully— another example that the pictures-of-the-real-life-subjects-in-the-biopic-credits cliché is being pushed further? Is this a sheer sign of Snowden’s PR thirst, the whistleblower needing to keep his celebrity growing or face irrelevance; and, thus, eternal Russian exile? Or is it just a Sign O’ The Times, this intermingling of actor and subject symbolising the ever-blurrier notions of what constitutes real and not-real, fact and fiction, in the Year The Reality-TV Star Ran For President?
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The actor in question —holding down the feature-length impersonation before the real Snowden shows up— is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s not the most opportune role, Gordon-Levitt tasked with playing someone at turns taciturn, diffident, hardened. And with playing someone whose face and voice are well-known: Snowden, himself, having already ‘starred’ in Laura Poitras’s history-as-it’s-happening documentary Citizenfour. Much of Gordon-Levitt’s performance is mimicry; it takes a full act to get used to his approximation of Snowden’s voice, a mock-baritone mumble.
Of course, given last time we saw Gordon-Levitt he was ooh-la-la-ing his way through a Frog accent in Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk —another film that, essentially, made a big-budget-biopic version of a story already told in an Oscar-nominated documentary— we can thank heaven that his great sin, here, is pitching down an octave. In a similar sense, we can be grateful for the fact that, for all the Oliver Stone-isms at play in Snowden, we’ve seen far, far worse (Angelina Jolie’s Alexander accent: Never Forget).
With Snowden, Stone is doing as he always has: punching up politically loaded history with grand gesture, embolism-inducing edits, action sequences, and monolithic symbols. The chief problem: for anyone who’s seen Citizenfour, there’s little-to-no suspense here. The best scenes in Snowden recreate that film being made: Melissa Leo playing Poitras; Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson the journalists Snowden leaked files for; the tension and paranoia of making history from a locked Hong Kong hotel room not quite as tense as the actual documentary made from that history. The rest of Snowden feels more scattershot, but essentially becomes another study in a man weighing up his relationship (with Shailene Woodley) with his career (where Rhys Ifans plays his sinister CIA mentor, and a brief appearance from Keith Stanfield is welcomed). As Gordon-Levitt climbs the corporate ladder, he gains access to ever-more information, and grows increasingly horrified by what he sees.
Like Born On The Fourth Of July, Platoon, Salvador et al, Stone’s 23rd film follows a conservative, patriotic American becoming disillusioned with his country when thrown into the frontlines of war. Stone, correctly, sees cyber-warfare as the new frontlines of globalised conflict, and paints Gordon-Levitt as a soldier navigating the moral conflict between doing his job/following orders/protecting his country, and harbouring the knowledge of the secret, silent horrors being enacted in the name of American imperialism.
It should be stirring stuff, but it seems weirdly stiff, stilted; perhaps nothing more symbolic of this than the fact that Nicolas Motherfucking Cage delivers a tasteful, toned-down supporting turn. The filmmaker’s fondness for fidgety edits and grand-sized flamboyance is there, but with none of the formalist looniness that marked Stone’s obnoxious, conspiracy-theory-laden early-’90s pics. Snowden’s unofficial position as Snowden-approved, Pardon-seeking PR-campaign item seems to have cowed the filmmaker. Previously, Stone has sought audiences’ outrage, ire, complicity, guilt, revulsion. Here, he just wants your polite applause.
