Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Snowden
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Snowden

Oliver Stone gets clattered by both the left and the right. He was attacked by the first for Nixon and W. — too kind to Tricky Dick and George Dubya — and is now being attacked by the second for Snowden. Too kind to the traitor who sprayed US surveillance secrets around the world. They have a point. Partiality is the heel in this Achilles film; though to this Achilles film’s credit, it also outruns, as storytelling, the tortoise forebodings we might have had about a true-life plot so cerebral and cyber-centric.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden with a passable physical likeness, a skilful vocal one and the puppyish alertness of a school swot suddenly shot — self-shot — to the top of the world notoriety class.

For the film’s first half he’s sweet, well-meaning and in love (with Shailene Allegiant Woodley, swapping YA kitsch for true-life morality drama). He’s schooled in CIA and NSA craft by sinister whisperers — Rhys Ifans, doing Clint Eastwood, and Scott Eastwood, doing (surprise) ditto — before conscience coaxes him to rebellion. A clever graphics sequence, mid-movie, presents US snooping as a pattern of whizzy, sparkling trajectories circling most of Cosmos Earth.

It’s true: who can doubt it? But then those, too, may have truth on their side who accused Snowden of carelessness in risking lives by blowing covers — and of thoughtlessness about who might benefit from this info spill, among states hostile to freedom. (In one of which he now lives.)

The Snowden antagonists don’t get a voice in the movie. Stone knows how to cut between time-zones and land-zones: we shuttle cleverly between a Hong Kong “present”, with Ed holed in the Mira Hotel alongside reporter Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and documentarist Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), and a US past that pieces itself together in extended flashback. The director also cuts cannily between moods: the intimate music of Snowden’s love life in fugal counterpoint with the Snoop-topia fever dreams of Langley and Washington. But the film has no idea, or no inclination, when it comes to cutting between pro-Ed and anti-Ed.

Snowden ends up as hagiography, pure and dimpled. It even gets Ed himself to fill the screen at the end with a glowing smirk, as if to say: “Yup, I changed history.” He may have. He may even have improved it. Then again, he may have hazarded others’ safety to create a world in which future leaders will maintain Snoop-topia with an even more fanatical care that leakers don’t leak and the wicked (to them) don’t Wiki.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Reuse this content (opens in new window) CommentsJump to comments section

Follow the topics in this article

Comments