Snowden (15)

ONE of cinema’s most political directors and the world’s most famous whistleblower might seem like a match made in heaven. But anyone expecting Oliver Stone’s fictionalised biography of Edward Snowden to be provocative, incendiary, rollicking good entertainment will be surprised, at the very least, if not downright disappointed.

Stone made his name with films that addressed some of the most troubled moments in American history with a combination of anti-establishment anger, hyperbolic storylines and conspiracy theory: the Vietnam war in Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July, the Kennedy assassination in JFK, the country’s most maligned presidency, in Nixon.

Recently he’s also ruffled feathers with his documentaries, highly sympathetic films about the late Latin American leaders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

So you’d think that Stone had hit pay dirt with Edward Snowden, a man deemed by some Americans to be a traitor, who is still wanted by the US government and forced to reside in Russia. The way in which Snowden orchestrated the theft and dissemination of massive amounts of state secrets couldn’t be bettered by spy fiction. And his revelations about America’s illegal surveillance of its citizens – and the whole world – would leave any rabble-rousing filmmaker rubbing his hands with glee.

And yet the resulting film could not be more sober and straightforward, verging on blandness.

It does have a fine performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who manages to capture the real Snowden’s geeky, monotone dullness, yet keep us interested in the man as growing outrage turns him towards daring, selfless action.

Stone charts a course through the 10 years leading to Snowden blowing the whistle on his employers. There’s the short-lived attempt to be a marine; his love of computers leading him to join the CIA; the assignment in Geneva during which he begins to doubt his bosses’ morality; the career as a private contractor for the National Security Agency, which widens his understanding of the scale of the government’s surveillance operations and allows him the access to do something about it.

The chronology is framed by Snowden’s clandestine meetings in a Hong Kong hotel room with the documentary-maker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill (Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson), in which he tells his story and offers his treasure trove of secrets. The emotional through line is Snowden’s topsy-turvy relationship with amateur photographer Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), whose left leanings help to influence his changing viewpoint.

It’s impossible when talking about Snowden to ignore Citizenfour, Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary about those Hong Kong meetings. That film is utterly gripping; and the effectiveness of this one depends, to some degree, on whether someone has seen Citizenfour or not.

For those who haven’t, Snowden will be a mildly thrilling drama that fleshes out the young man’s personality and explains his journey from unquestioning patriot to whistleblower.

Those who have seen Citizenfour will find this lame by comparison; it’s unfortunate that Stone’s worst scenes are those in the hotel, which have a laughably inept melodrama about them compared to the real-life equivalents in the documentary.

One sign that this is sub-par Stone is the waste of so many good actors, none of whom has room to develop their character, including Nicolas Cage as a CIA computer genius whose integrity has cost him dear.

It’s ironic that the only actor given space to work is Rhys Ifans, as a fictional amalgam of CIA bosses, whose pantomime villain represents Stone’s more subjective inclinations at their worst. The character’s name is O’Brien, a clear nod to the character in Orwell’s 1984. At times, he might as well have Big Brother stamped on his forehead.

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