Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Joseph-Gordon Levitt, Rhys Ifans, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo
[rating: 2/5]
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
The biggest surprise regarding Oliver Stone’s Snowden is how dull and flat it is. Not the revelations that are now inarguably dated but no less disturbing, not the style, and certainly not the delivery. Stone obviously considers his subject a national hero and why wouldn’t he? In 2013 Edward Snowden bought to light the shockingly intrusive levels of surveillance present in America’s highest intelligence organisation and he risked his life to do it, knowing that at the very least it would lead to his exile. Since then he’s been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero, and a patriot. His story should be a tense, engaging experience full of twists and turns, we should feel the walls closing in. But we don’t. Stone, who demonstrated in 1991 with his behemoth JFK how skilful he is at exposing the abuse and manipulation of power in America’s political administration, is off his game here. You could feel his creativity and cynicism in JFK, and he excited us. Highly stylized and edited with razor blades, it was brilliantly cast and the looming magic bullet theory was cause for anticipation. You won’t feel that charge here.
It begins with Snowden’s covert meeting in Hong Kong with journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), and Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo); Poitras would go on to direct Citizenfour, the infinitely more bracing 2014 documentary about the events shown here. Holed up in a hotel room, he tells the trio his story of how he started in the United States Army Reserve (where he broke his leg during training), moved on to the University of Maryland’s Centre for Advanced Study of Language where he was employed as a “security specialist”, and then fatefully secured a position at Dell where he was responsible for maintaining network security and stumbled onto one of his country’s biggest secrets. With some tone and fluency, this should have been a wowser.
Aside from Stone’s direction lacking any momentum, the main problem here is in the casting. As Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is physically a neat fit. He embodies the studiousness of the subject and we can believe his skill and intelligence but those eyes of his never stop twinkling. This is the story of a man confronted with horror, megabytes of it, but Gordon-Levitt never finds a way to pitch it. He can’t take all the blame. Stone and his co-screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald never colour the character. Even with his romance with Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), and rarely has a romance been less enchanting, he’s little more than a vessel to see us through to the finish line. As miscast here as was in last year’s The Walk, Gordon-Levitt just strolls through the film, earnest, with knitted brows. There’s a well-orchestrated scene where he smuggles the incriminating information, hidden in a Rubik’s Cube, out of the Dell facility in Hawaii (it’s the only moment we’re drawn into the film) but it only leaves us frustrated that the rest of the film doesn’t capture us so intensely. When he’s in the hotel room telling all to the journalists, he keeps staring out the window, certain his enemies are all around him but again the sensation is lacking. His paranoia, regarding the system he helped create but now wants to overturn, isn’t given enough foundation. We only know it because we’re clobbered over the head with it. Stone provides him a bubbling electronic score and dim lighting for every revelation but I could never shake the feeling that Stone has no faith in us.
What Snowden did should’ve changed the world but it didn’t. The result was of course an increase in national security and even tighter surveillance measures and after watching this you might want to increase your own…with a bandaid. In the end, Snowden serves us more than its subject. Perhaps that was Stone’s plan all along.
