{"id":79362,"date":"2016-09-12T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=79362"},"modified":"2016-09-11T16:48:26","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T15:48:26","slug":"toronto-film-review-oliver-stones-snowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/09\/toronto-film-review-oliver-stones-snowden\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto Film Review: Oliver Stone\u2019s \u2018Snowden\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oliver Stone’s docudrama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is the director’s most exciting \u2014 and relevant \u2014 movie in years.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Courtesy<\/a>

Courtesy of Open Road<\/p><\/div>\n

9 Sep 2016 – <\/em>Let\u2019s be honest: Oliver Stone<\/a> hasn\u2019t made an Oliver Stone movie that mattered in more than 20 years. The firebrand urgency that once defined his name \u2014 the way he directed films that seized the zeitgeist, that drove the conversation, that inspired controversy because of how they leapt into the drama of history \u2014 has, for too long, been trapped in the past. Which is not to say that Stone hasn\u2019t tried. He has made films that bent over backwards to be topical, like the earnest and sentimental 9\/11 requiem \u201cWorld Trade Center,\u201d or the goofy provocative political cartoon \u201cW.,\u201d or the cautionary-but-behind-the-curve financial thriller \u201cWall Street: Money Never Sleeps.\u201d One or two of these movies \u201cfound an audience,\u201d but none found a purpose; even when they managed to connect at the box office, they disappeared from the public consciousness like puffs of smoke.<\/p>\n

But Stone\u2019s exile in the desert of overheated irrelevance has now ended. \u201cSnowden<\/a>\u201d isn\u2019t just the director\u2019s most exciting work since \u201cNixon\u201d (1995) \u2014 it\u2019s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years. Telling the story of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who became a whistleblower and fugitive by leaking documents that revealed the vast, spidery, paradigm-shifting scope of the new American surveillance state, Stone has made a movie that asks the audience to look, almost convulsively, at what this issue really means, and at who Edward Snowden really is.<\/p>\n

You might think you already know. Maybe you decided, a while back, that Snowden is a \u201ctraitor,\u201d or that he went too far in leaking documents and revealing NSA secrets. Or maybe you saw \u201cCitizenfour,\u201d the 2014 Laura Poitras documentary that presented the interview Snowden gave just as he was going rogue, and you decided he\u2019s one of the heroes of our time. But whether you\u2019re pro-Snowden, anti-Snowden, or somewhere in between, Stone\u2019s movie is sure to deepen your response to his actions, and to the whole evolution of the American intelligence community in the age of meta-technology. \u201cSnowden\u201d isn\u2019t leftist-conspiratorial propaganda (though some may accuse it of being that). It\u2019s a riveting procedural docudrama that takes a deep dive into what surveillance has become. In doing so, it\u2019s a movie that \u2014\u00a0no small thing \u2014 makes Oliver Stone matter again.<\/p>\n

It helps that Snowden, played with crisp magnetism by Joseph Gordon-Levitt<\/a>, is the furthest thing from a crusader, or even a liberal. He\u2019s a straitlaced, mild-mannered conservative brainiac who loves his country so much that he wants to devote his life to defending it. When we meet him, in 2004, he\u2019s in basic training in the United States Army Reserve (it\u2019s 9\/11 that inspires him to join up), but he\u2019s not really the athletic military type \u2014 he goes through the grueling exercises wearing clunky tortoise-shell glasses \u2014 and when he leaps off a bunk and breaks his leg, it\u2019s because the pounding training has already slowly shattered his delicate bones. His career as a combat warrior is over before it begins. So he goes for the next best thing: a slot in the CIA, where the fight for U.S. security is already playing out on the battleground of the future \u2014 namely, cyberspace.<\/p>\n

Snowden, terse and owlishly square, now with rectangle frames that make him look a little hipper, is attracted to the Agency the way that so many of its members have been, out of a combination of duty and a desire for excitement. During his interview with Corbin O\u2019Brian (Rhys Ifans), who will become his mentor, he answers a question by admitting that he thinks it would be \u201ccool\u201d to have top-level security clearance \u2014 which turns out to be the wrong thing to say. For all his eagerness, and despite his clean resume, he\u2019s told that in another era, he probably wouldn\u2019t make the cut. But before he is anything else, Edward is a dazzlingly gifted computer scientist: a prodigy, a geek, a hacker. That gives him the ideal equipment to be a soldier in the next war. In the old days (i.e., the \u201970s), a CIA analyst was a desk jockey, standing behind the field agents, but in \u201cSnowden\u201d cyberspace is<\/em> the field. Corbin tells Edward that 20 years from now, \u201cIraq will be a hellhole no one cares about,\u201d and that the whole war on terror is a sideshow. The real conflict, he says, will be with China and Russia, fought with rogue computer worms and malware. \u201cSnowden\u201d is the ultimate true-life hacker thriller.<\/p>\n

The movie doesn\u2019t have the kaleidoscopic dazzle of Stone\u2019s great \u201990s films (\u201cJFK,\u201d \u201cNatural Born Killers\u201d), but it has his heady propulsive fever. It\u2019s framed by the \u201cCitizenfour\u201d interview, which Stone re-stages as a piece of verit\u00e9 suspense, set in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, with Edward\u00a0gliding through the lobby like an egghead Jason Bourne, fiddling with his telltale Rubik\u2019s Cube. Melissa Leo plays Poitras as tough, rumpled, and maternal, and Zachary Quinto, all driven neurotic fire (even his flat hair is intense), is Glenn Greenwald, the fiercely independent journalist who interviewed Snowden for Poitras\u2019 camera. You get the feeling, more than you did watching \u201cCitizenfour,\u201d that there was an honest terror beneath the proceedings \u2014 that given the subject of surveillance, the CIA might have burst in at any moment. But it\u2019s not just about their safety. The stakes are so high because the theme of the interview, and the issue of whether they can publish it in the London-based newspaper The Guardian, is momentous. This is their one and only chance to expose the truth before Snowden disappears.<\/p>\n

The movie cuts back and forth between the interview and everything that led up to it. At the\u00a0Hill, the CIA training center in Virginia, Snowden dazzles his teachers and befriends an Agency veteran\u00a0(a warmly understated Nicolas Cage) who\u2019s been put out to pasture, sitting in his office that\u2019s like a museum of ancient and legendary tradecraft equipment. He and Edward discuss Enigma machines, and the very first computer (which is there), and we\u2019re cued to realize that the entire history of computers is, on some level, a history of spying. Gordon-Levitt does a meticulous impersonation of the Snowden manner: clipped and impeccable, his articulate, logical voice always trying to touch the reality of whatever he\u2019s talking about. He\u2019s certainly a geek, but with an important qualifier: He\u2019s cool as a cucumber \u2014 free of any visible anxiety (or anger). At times, he\u2019s like a very friendly automaton, but it\u2019s not like he doesn\u2019t have passion; as we\u2019ll see, it just takes a lot to get him riled.<\/p>\n

He also thinks he\u2019s got everything figured out. On a dating site called Geek-Mate, Edward meets Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley<\/a>), a local girl who\u2019s sweet-natured and hot-tempered at the same time. They connect from their first date, but they\u2019ve got major differences. Lindsay, a little aimless but shrewd and informed, thinks the Iraq War is a corrupt disaster, whereas Edward believes he grasps the bigger picture: the defense of the United States, and the things that go into that, which liberals shield themselves from knowing (even though they want the benefits of protection, too). Essentially, he\u2019s making the Dick Cheney argument, but it\u2019s bracing, in an Oliver Stone film, to see that POV represented by the movie\u2019s hero. Edward and Lindsay\u2019s political differences have a touch of screwball-comedy friction. When she figures out that he\u2019s working for the Agency after having traced where his message came from, he says, \u201cYou know how to run an IP trace?\u201d For him, that\u2019s practically a love lyric. Woodley gives a performance of breathtaking dimension: As the movie goes on, she makes Lindsay supportive and selfish, loving and stricken.<\/p>\n

Edward is assigned to the National Security Agency, the division of U.S. intelligence devoted, essentially, to data-gathering. He\u2019s dispatched to different locales (Geneva, Tokyo, Hawaii), and Lindsay goes to live with him in each one. But the job tears away at their relationship, because he isn\u2019t allowed to utter a word about what he does. Still, that works fine\u00a0\u2014 until he starts to question what he\u2019s doing. Because he has no one to ask the questions to. So he starts to implode.<\/p>\n

In Switzerland, one of his colleagues, a deceptively laidback dude named Gabriel (Ben Schnetzer), shows Edward something he doesn\u2019t technically have security clearance for: the CIA program known as XKeyscore. It\u2019s essentially a search engine that can take you\u2026anywhere. Behind any wall of privacy. But wait a minute, says Edward, what about FISA? That\u2019s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which dictates the rules of surveillance and says, in essence, that you need a warrant each time you cross one of those walls. Gabriel explains that FISA is \u201ca big-ass rubber stamp,\u201d because the court that controls it is a government outfit handing out rote permission slips.<\/p>\n

At that point, he shows Edward the \u201coptic nerve,\u201d something that couldn\u2019t have existed even 20 years ago. The intelligence community, Gabriel demonstrates, can now enter any home right through its computer or phone \u2014 through the webcam, or the screen itself. The old notion of \u201cbugging\u201d (a microphone hidden in the lamp!) has become something out of the Stone Age. The whole world is now connected, via computer. And so is the data, including texts and videos and e-mails. The intelligence community has access to it all, having fused itself, essentially, with the servers of the biggest Internet companies (Google, Apple, etc.).<\/p>\n

\u201cSnowden\u201d has a perilously unfolding sense of revelation. The film\u2019s moral and logistical brilliance is that what Edward \u2014 and the audience \u2014 learns, bit by bit, is not<\/em> that there\u2019s a cabal of sinister bad guys sitting in a room somewhere, plotting how to take away your privacy. The data-gathering has evolved organically, and maybe inevitably, with<\/em> the technology. And yet it\u2019s creepy (to put it mildly). At home, Edward puts a piece of tape over his webcam, because he realizes that someone could be looking at him (or Lindsay). He\u2019s not paranoid; he\u2019s just enlightened. The dialogue in \u201cSnowden\u201d is often dense with technical jargon, but instead of distancing us, the authenticity of the language reels us in. There\u2019s something dramatic in how all the talk is about shrouding things.<\/p>\n

The spies behind the computer curtain can touch the whole world, but the more they look at it, the more disconnected from its reality they become. \u201cSnowden\u201d peels this cyber-voyeuristic onion, layer by layer, until we\u2019re watching, on a live feed, gruesome drone attacks in the Middle East, where the targets have been identified by their cell phones. A bomb goes off \u2014 a moving car gets vaporized \u2014 and if there\u2019s collateral damage (like, say, the target\u2019s family), so be it. No one in the control room cares, because the ideology at hand (eliminate the terrorists) has been heightened with a death-by-joystick ease that comes from\u00a0staring at people through technology all day long, until they become at once right there<\/em> and totally unreal. It\u2019s the sociopathology of screens.<\/p>\n

Edward takes all of this in, and it horrifies him, but he doesn\u2019t know what to do about it. He\u2019s not a rebel, and questioning authority in even the tiniest way has no place in the culture of intelligence. At one point, he resigns, but he is lured back in, and by the time he lands in Hawaii, he has begun to assemble a bigger picture. He shows his NSA associates \u2014 a fascinating club of young turks \u2014 how there\u2019s twice as much data-gathering going on in the U.S. as there is in Russia. He knows there\u2019s something wrong with that; it\u2019s spying evolving into Big Brother. Stone stages a fantastic scene in which Edward talks to Corbin, his boss and mentor, on a giant screen, and Rhys Ifans\u2019 face looms up like some CIA version of the Wizard of Oz. He\u2019s terrifying, especially when he reveals that he heard that conversation between Edward and his colleagues. He knows whether or not Lindsay is having an affair; he knows everything, and the cozy violation of it all is queasy. By the time Edward decides to act, it\u2019s because he can\u2019t not act. Stone creates a powerful wake-up call.<\/p>\n

Is he saying that there\u2019s a conspiracy at work? If so, the movie makes the point that it\u2019s a conspiracy we have all, naively, colluded in, frittering away our privacy through our addiction to technology. Yet that hardly means we asked the government to know everything about us, all the time. \u201cSnowden\u201d frames the issue so that we can frame it ourselves. The movie has a deep-focus perspective, and a spine-tingling immediacy. It ends with the real Snowden, who Stone interviewed in Moscow, where he is still living under asylum. He\u2019s presented in\u00a0a glow of heroism, followed by headlines about how much influence he has had (the new laws restricting mass gathering of data, etc.). Yet Snowden\u2019s presence only reminds us of how unfinished this story is. The real message of \u201cSnowden\u201d is that surveillance is a Pandora\u2019s Box. You may leave the movie grateful for everything that Edward Snowden brought to light, but also wondering if that box can ever be closed.<\/p>\n

Crew<\/strong><\/p>\n

Director: Oliver Stone. Screenplay: Stone, Kieran Fitzgerald. Camera (color, widescreen): Anthony Dod Mantle. Editors: Alex Marquez, Lee Percy.<\/p>\n

With<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Ben Schnetzer.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 variety.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oliver Stone’s docudrama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is the director’s most exciting \u2014 and relevant \u2014 movie in years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}