Hero worshippers should be predisposed to Oliver Stone’s Snowden, opening this Friday, September 16, 2016.
They will not be disappointed.
I’m not a fan of the controversial filmmaker’s, though his pictures, such as Alexander and JFK, have merit. Like his right-wing counterpart, director Clint Eastwood—whose September movie Sully also laments and examines the fall of the hero who is a much-maligned white male—leftist Oliver Stone makes character studies. Stone’s movies, like Eastwood’s, are naturalistic. They are not romanticized.
Snowden may be Stone’s best picture. Though flawed, slow and uneven in stretches, the cinematic adaptation of two books about the young American for whom it is titled is surprisingly even-handed, moving and potent. Stone is merciless in assailing the Obama administration’s dishonesty, portraying the fundamental betrayal of essential American principles, and decent people such as Edward Snowden, with sharp lines, video clips and cuts.
Snowden, like Sully, starts with the sound of voices. They talk on the telephone. Audio gives way to video and social media until, slowly, insidiously, it dawns on the audience what mass, indiscriminate metadata collection by the state means in everyday practice—how it violates your privacy and your rights, how by implication surveillance statism does nothing to defend your rights, your money or your life. Stone employs this shadowy, paranoid sensibility throughout the film. It is one of his trademarks.
He also deviates from his hyper-masculinity with a depiction of an intelligent and sensitive man at the beginning, as against the end as in Sully, of an exceptional career. Ed Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Walk), as he’s sometimes known here, enlists in the U.S. Army Special Forces after the Islamic terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The small, slender, vision-impaired epileptic computer geek lacks the physicality to make it through basic training.
But Snowden possesses the desire, dedication and patriotism. The Army stint, shown as in Sully through scattered flashbacks, marks a turning point in his philosophical growth. This progression is captured in one crucial scene in which Edward Snowden reveals to an interviewer key influences, such as Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Campbell and Ayn Rand.
“Ah, Atlas Shrugged,” the interviewer says in recognition of Rand’s masterpiece, referring to one man who stopped the motor of the world. So goes Snowden‘s theme that the idealist moves the world, in Snowden’s case at the price of his own mobility and autonomy. This is how Stone, with screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald, casts the tale’s individualist—with Edward Snowden as a real-life John Galt.
At least Stone, an anti-war conspiracy theorist who once sought to remake The Fountainhead, grasps that “going Galt” means blending in to change the world. This is exactly what self-taught Snowden does as he gains security clearance and stature to earn trust and authority, including from Nicolas Cage’s mentor (who’s like Henry Cameron in The Fountainhead), setting terms and hacking systems at the state’s various spy and surveillance apparatuses including the CIA and NSA at posts in Europe, Asia and the Eastern and Western United States.
The freethinking high school dropout is paired with a free-spirited sensualist (Shailene Woodley of the Divergent films) to accentuate the mind-body meld to come. Their romance heightens tension. Woodley, who apparently sought the role on principle, adds poignancy. Both characters rise above surveillance state whispers smearing them as misfits. Ed and Lindsay (like Sully and his wife Lorraine in the other movie) are productive equals in partnership trying to live and enjoy life on their own terms.
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Snowden is inscrutable and remote. His girlfriend is expressive and right there in the moment. Like many of today’s hobbled youths, they seek to find balance in a confusing world. Whether they succeed is entirely unknown, and necessarily so, as this movie must remain elusive to protect the innocent (and, in real life, Edward Snowden met with Stone and Fitzgerald in Moscow and cooperated with the movie, making it more pro-American, according to Stone.) Stay seated for the end credits for a clue. Woodley’s Lindsay really puts Snowden’s actions in perspective of the pursuit of happiness. If a fraction of this story is true, it’s an alarming, powerful and chilling account of the nation’s descent into dictatorship.
As Snowden remains straight, sincere and principled in his patriotism, trying to decode the security versus liberty false dichotomy for himself, with Woodley regarding questioning government as the principle upon which America was founded, Snowden filters references to FISA courts, the Iraq war, encryption, the military-industrial complex, PRISM and Xkeyscore into its paranoid mix of Cold War and post-9/11 government types controlling the country with fear but neither clarity in communication nor victory in war.
This makes Snowden‘s basic flaw—a refusal to depict a single Islamic terrorist act—more glaring. Dramatizing Snowden’s traitorous or heroic act in 2013 (which I first wrote about here and praised in earnest here) requires a plausible argument against surveillance statism, which means accounting for its results, which necessitates showing acts of war by jihadists.
None are evident in Stone’s Snowden.
The absence of jihadists robs the movie of a crucial part of what must have been readily evident to Snowden, whose life starts to resemble Jason Bourne’s; that none of this incessant “security theater” (i.e., TSA) stops Islamic terrorist attacks. Despite this omission of relevant facts, Snowden is not mere propaganda (like Spike Lee’s interesting Malcolm X) and, while it moves glacially in spots through the programmer’s methodical approach to understanding his government, his girlfriend and how his work might harm the innocent, he fully earns his conclusion that “the only thing we’re protecting is the supremacy of [the] government.”
In fact, Snowden downplays the fundamental threat and danger to man’s rights by grounding the tale in the tension-packed days when he met with filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), left-wing activist and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and assumes a broad context of knowledge about the ramifications of mass, unchecked statism. After Snowden quit the CIA on principle, he “thought things were going to get better under [Barack] Obama”, like many Americans did in 2008, which is why the movie’s second half, as he moves with Lindsay to Oahu to work in an underground spy facility, generates suspense and heaviness.
His historic act of defiance snowballs into a nerve-wracking climax that taps today’s mass anxiety.
“I was wrong,” Snowden says about his trust and optimism for President Obama, whose lies consume the story and threaten everything Edward Snowden—who by now has gone from being a pale code-puncher to a man with priorities, commitment and the blush of color—values, treasures and loves. “Yes We Can” becomes the motto affirming Big Brother’s rising power to watch and control your life, with Gordon-Levitt nailing Snowden’s measured, composed analysis, referencing the Nuremberg trials to his complacent, compliant boss (Scott Eastwood) and judging for himself what constitutes proper transparency and disclosure.
In the end, with a Hong Kong hotel’s Do Not Disturb sign serving as the euphemism for the great American proclamation “Don’t Tread On Me”, Snowden pulls off what is at once sharp, powerful and painful to watch: a penetrating portrait of a damaged, fragile youth of ability and promise—representing America’s future—driven to surrender his freedom and flee to faraway lands by military-industrial statism, i.e., fascism, in order to protect his life, rights, woman and Constitutional republic. Snowden in its paranoia and grating, glacial imperfection, delivers a pale-faced superhero who is human, frail and vital—not hollow, weak and blank.
For this reason, Snowden is excruciatingly emotional if you know in advance what his being jettisoned from the nation he fought to serve objectively means and it’s likely to be inexplicably agonizing and anxiety-inducing if you don’t. In either case, you will probably want to exercise free choice over controlling your private property and keep covering your computer’s camera. Whatever you think of Edward Snowden and Oliver Stone’s Snowden, you have only Ed Snowden to thank for that.
Oliver Stone’s new movie about Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose act of defiance against the Obama administration led to his persecution and exile and awareness of the surveillance state, debuts on September 16.
The title is Snowden. The tagline: “The only safe place is on the run.”
Judging by the polished, paranoia-themed trailer, Snowden will be typical of Stone, the Academy Award®-winning director of Platoon, Alexander, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Wall Street and World Trade Center. The trailer looks like it bears his usual marks; creative license apparently taken with what’s known about Snowden’s motives, relationships and life, to the extent this is discernible, Stone’s dark, moody look and an all-star cast including Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek), Rhys Ifans (The Amazing Spider-Man), Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider), Tom Wilkinson (Batman Begins), Shailene Woodley of the Divergent series and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Walk, Mysterious Skin, Lincoln) as Edward Snowden (watch Snowden‘s trailer hereand read my thoughts on Edward Snowden here.)
At least Gordon-Levitt, an excellent actor (he’s marvelous in the exquisite The Walk), is a fine choice as the lead. Also, in this case, unlike leftist Stone’s compelling but flawed JFK, the movie’s apparent subject, the essential story of the man who unmasked the American surveillance state, is, in fact, a conspiracy, by the government’s admission. Snowden is a hero if you think, as I do, that the United States is becoming totally controlled by the state, and a traitor if you believe that the state’s proper role is security regardless of individual rights. What he did, whatever your philosophy, has an undeniable impact on Americans’ lives and liberty, including influence on Apple’s courageous decision to defy the government, and Snowden could be better than Stone’s previous pictures, including Alexander, his mixed and wrongly maligned 2004 movie about Alexander the Great.
With the first of two Kennedy assassinations all over the airwaves, and the media cashing in on the 50th anniversary of an American president’s murder, I decided to finally see JFK (1991) starring Kevin Costner.
I’ve limited my exposure to the films of director Oliver Stone. His political philosophy is repulsive — he embraces dictators — so his pictures hardly seemed worth the aggravation. During my tenure at Box Office Mojo, I reported on and reviewed two of his movies, World Trade Center, which dramatizes the monstrous view that there’s an upside to mass murder, and Alexander, a mediocre movie about Alexander the Great which was wrongly ridiculed in the press and turned out to have some very good moments.
So does JFK, which screened at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with a pre-screening appearance by Stone. As truth-telling, it is dubious, though I am not an expert on the death of John Kennedy and I defer to those who are. As a movie, JFK is, like Alexander, nearly unwatchable in parts. Stone’s frantic emotionalism runs amok, delivering fits, starts and half-starts, more fits, then flashes and fragments, especially during the first hour of this three-hour film.
But in parts it is thought-provoking. Beginning with a speech by President Eisenhower warning about the rise of the “military-industrial complex,” JFK wraps the assassination in a Louisiana lawyer’s (Costner) investigation of a crooked and apparently closeted homosexual (Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln) who, it is claimed, was an agent of the CIA assigned in conspiracy to plot the murder. JFK grows more insistent. It climaxes in a recreation of the assassination complete with graphic, rarely seen photographs and a courtroom speech by Costner’s character that could have been made by someone in today’s Tea Party. The attorney makes a case and urges the jury to doubt the government, asking: “Is the government worth preserving when it lies to the people?”
It’s a legitimate question, particularly as we near pre-dictatorship and government, led by a president whom we now know is a liar, plots to spy on Americans. There are other moments, too, if one does not take JFK as documentary. With the appearance of Donald Sutherland as a government worker who goes rogue to tell the truth, JFK takes an interesting if implausible turn toward an argument against “just following orders.” The film’s thesis that President Kennedy was killed by factions in government that wanted him out of the way because he wanted peace in Vietnam is less persuasive than doubts it raises about Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) as the lone assassin on November 22, 1963.
I remain unconvinced by Stone’s hyper-drama, which entails circuitous connections of gays, Cubans, addicts, mafia, crooked cops and criminals to three teams that pummeled Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally with bullets as the motorcade passed a plaza in downtown Dallas. At its best, the film, which preposterously compares the assassination to the Crucifixion, raises questions about what Oswald the Communist did and why. It’s hard to keep track of the facts crammed into this movie — with Joe Pesci’s wig all over his head to distraction and everyone swearing like it’s a Tarantino picture — and some of JFK is as campy as one should expect from a leftist filmmaker who cavorts with Communist regimes. But it’s also hard to ignore that the lawyer who believed that Kennedy was assassinated by his own government was a real man named Jim Garrison who was targeted by the IRS, like today’s Tea Party, and electronically bugged by the FBI.
The most interesting scene predates a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 pacifist apologia, Munich. The scene comes when Costner’s husband-father-crusader Garrison realizes that a key part of his theory is proven right. His doubting wife (Sissy Spacek, excellent as ever) realizes he’s right, too. As she does, she feels liberated. As Garrison’s partial vindication comes — and most rational Americans should be able to relate to this now — he is struck with horror, feeling deep fear and a suddenly acute awareness of reality at once. Garrison is transformed into the husband he hasn’t been. It’s a powerful scene, done with an intimacy that draws back until the camera holds on a shot which allows the audience to observe a more innocent place and time in American history. It’s a subtle flip on the myth that America lost her innocence when Kennedy was shot; the best Americans sobered up and doubled down on their bountiful benevolence.
“Do your own thinking,” someone urges during JFK, which ultimately lets the viewer do exactly that. If Stone’s overzealous filmmaking gets the best of his movie, as it almost always does, it’s not without poignant scenes and passion for his subject.
Of course, JFK‘s subject is JFK’s assassination, not John F. Kennedy, contrary to the movie’s title. If it were, we’d see that President Kennedy rightly considered himself a lousy president, that he admired fascism (as I wrote here) and conspired to let the 20th century’s bloodiest dictatorship enslave millions of people (as I observed when I read and reviewed this book on the Berlin Wall). Stone is primarily invested here in making a display of his subjectivism, making facts fit his thesis. That’s Oliver Stone. But A is A, facts are facts and there’s still something to think about in his mixed JFK.
When he introduced his movie this week at the Cinerama Dome, Stone made reference to the Church committee in Congress, which foresaw today’s leaps toward totalitarianism. He referred to Arlen Specter, the late Democrat senator from Pennsylvania who was a young lawyer on the government’s Warren Commission investigating the assassination, as “one of the greatest villains of our history.” And Stone denounced our commander-in-chief, the most anti-American president in history, which Stone does on a regular basis. That’s more than most professed idealists bring themselves to do. So the notion that there’s a conspiracy within the government to turn the government into a omnipotent power isn’t just coming from the Tea Party and, as President Eisenhower warned, it is a serious threat to liberty. Especially with the military apparently being purged by Obama.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, goes the saying. People who think America is becoming a dictatorship by deliberate, systematic steps shouldn’t dismiss everything by Oliver Stone, who told the favorably disposed audience — in answer to a question about whether he thinks that he, too, has been marked for death by the state — that he “wouldn’t mind getting out of here pretty soon.”
America is mixed. America is in trouble. America no longer protects individual liberty. In Stone’s mixed, troubled and totalitarian-friendly thoughts, he may have a sense that we’re going down and want to stop it. If so, as warped as his political philosophy is, that’s better than one who knows better and does nothing about what he knows.
Well-crafted, well-written movies are being made — The Lives of Others, The King’s Speech, The Artist — and JFK is not one of them. More often than not, the market is filled with asinine movies that degrade the culture at a crucial time when the West is coming to an end. JFK, to its credit,is thankfully not one of those. Because, like Alexander, it deals with an issue that matters, it is better than most movies.
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Judging by the polished, paranoia-themed trailer, Snowden will be typical of Stone, the Academy Award®-winning director of Platoon, Alexander, Born on the Fourth of July, 