"When one is young it seems so very easy to distinguish between right and wrong. But as one gets older it becomes more difficult, the villains and the heroes get all mixed up."
Rene Mathis, Quantum of Solace
The wisdom of the mob plays tricks with reality. You see it a lot, especially as age gives you longevity and experience. You remember incidents that time glosses over in pertinent detail. On the other hand, the demands of the "24 hour news cycle" creates an urgency for happenstance when the "tube" needs to be filled, often with speculation and mis-information that gets refuted later with the clarity of time. Information and time yin and yang separating truth from fiction—but not everybody gets the message. And depending on when the hearing happens, people tend to hear something and believe it, even if it gets refuted. People believe what it is easier to believe...or merely what they want, never mind the facts. Over the next couple of days, recent movies about individuals who are judged by single acts, and whether they are heroes or villains, depends on your point of view in the audience.
Epic Shelter or ...a Very Frustrating Individual
It's always difficult to say that an Oliver Stone film is "based on a true story." Every subject he makes a film about goes through "The Stone Filter," injecting his views, his "Daddy issues," his prejudices, whether they're called for or not. It's tough to separate the man from his movies, like Howard Hawks or John Ford (but even those film veterans changed over time). Stone is stuck in his mind-set and screenplay-template, and he will tailor the facts to meet his own expectations. Film-makers do this all the time, compressing characters into one, juggling time, and even inventing incidents and people to help drive home a dramatic point. But Stone is egregious about it and unapologetic. He is an auteur, and so, rather than serve the story or the material, he serves himself. And so, his films, be they fiction or non-fiction, biography or fantasy, whatever genre they're in, feel much the same. Snowden, his latest, follows the same pattern,*showing the transformation of the young tech-savvy, politically-conservative**veteran (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to eventual whistle-blower, after serving time in the military to timing servers in the CIA, working on intricate hacking scenarios and data collection, but running afoul of inter-agency politics and becoming paranoid and disenchanted with the breadth and depth of intelligence gathering and interpretation.
Stone starts the film in Tokyo, where Snowden has flown from his job in Hawaii after smuggling NSA files using a rigged Rubick's cube (wonder how high that is on the TSA lists these days). Snowden is in limbo. He's taken files, but that activity has not yet been discovered, and that won't happen until the contents have been published. To accomplish this, he needs documentation and verification. He meets documentary film-maker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), who will eventually make the film Citizenfour and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). Once they're informed, it's a race against time. He'll be tracked, investigated and hunted. There will be no room for error. In the down-time waiting for confirmations before transmitting the files, he goes into his back-story negotiating his military service, discharge for injuries, his entree into the CIA. Why any of this back-story involves meeting his eventual girlfriend (Shailene Woodley), it's tough to say, but I'm sure it serves some journalistic function and might demonstrate some level of sacrifice for going into hiding.
During the course of the story, we meet some influences: Professor Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage), who, himself, has worked in the intelligence community and found the experience dispiriting and demoralizing. At the CIA, he meets another mentor, Corbin O'Brian (Rhys Ifans, a wonderfully creepy performance without much effort), who, impressed with Snowden's skills, champions his course through intelligence. For Stone's by-the-book story-telling, the protagonist must choose between two opposed father-figures, each serving a role as angel or devil on the protagonist's shoulders. Lately, Stone has gotten subtler in his dependence on the "Daddy" trope—he even managed to undersell the huge one in W. But, in his early films, like Platoon and Wall Street, those conflicts form the very basis of the films. In such scenario's, you need to have the conflicting world-views in order for the guy in the middle to reach his own path, and Stone returns to the formula to tell Snowden's story. It isn't enough that he's frightened by the cavalier way his fellow intel-minders collect data. Any back-door, any un-shaded camera, anything can give them access into people's private lives. Snowden goes from disenchanted to paranoid, beginning to cover his laptop's camera aperture with tape, questioning motivations for the details, while also beginning to question "The Big Picture."
The special effects crew get their cameo's.
Pretty soon, he begins to magically morph with Stone's world-view: the intel-gathering is not, as it's portrayed, "to fight the terrorists," it's to protect "the Military-Industrial Complex," Stone's multi-tentacled monster (not that he's wrong, particularly, it's just that everything in his "non-fiction" films usually circle around to involving the preservation of the MIC as a conspiracy and underlying motivation for almost everything). He does pound on it as much as he has previously, but the man can't make a movie without a mention of it.
Back in Tokyo, the trio are joined by The Guardian's Ewen McAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and the four send the data to The Guardian's offices, where the managing editor (Joely Richardson) is being ultra-careful in deciding to publish. Greenwald finally loses it under the pressure and threatens other avenues of dissemination, post-scripted with a mention of The Guardian's reluctance. They get assurance that it will be published at a certain time and plans are made to book Snowden out of the hotel and to the next "undisclosed location."
"My name's O'Brien...oh, sorry...it's spelled O'Brian....what year is this?"
Stone bounces back and forth in time-lines using casual conversation as a segue, some of which works, some of which is merely contrivance, and he hauls out some special effects to represent "Internet-land," probably for those who can't grasp the concept of connectivity—which might approach absolute zero. He touches on Snowden's health issues perfunctorily, dabbles with "the girlfriend" issue, but, mostly, it seems the warring fathers aspect is what he's concentrating on, expanding the two characters' importance beyond what they would appear...for two characters that are actually fictional. Just what part of this movie are we supposed to believe? And if we're being led down the Stone path, it would be nice to believe in something. The Tokyo sequences recall Citizenfour and the flashbacks could all be fever-dream or epilepsy-haze, but we're not given any indication that it might be anything less than rock-solid reality.
Dramatization
So...hero or villain? Stone provides no perspective other than his own. Oh, there's a moment of negativity, but it's mostly from topical higher-up's like Clinton and Trump ("...they used to execute people like this...")—in other words, no perspective. And one's opinions will be informed by whatever political leanings one might have—whether they see Snowden as a hero for exposing domestic surveillance among cell-carriers***or a villain for showing how extensive the data collection techniques are (in which case you might think him a hero for having something to do with hacking the DNC). The choice is in ourselves...and, like most controversial figures, he is judged for that one act in a lifetime (in much the same way as the protagonist of Sully).
Reality
* Stone was reportedly reluctant to take on another contemporary subject, wanting to make a film about Martin Luther King. He took the project on after the King movie fell behind and after meeting with Snowden in Moscow. ** Just HOW conservative Snowden is/was, Stone keeps a little nebulous. During his first date with his soon-to-be girlfriend, she makes a crack about the government under Bush, and Stone has him say "I just don't like people bashing our government." Okay. It fits the "Stone Filter" that Snowden have a hero's journey from one extreme to another, ala Born on the Fourth of July, or JFK, while keeping an idealism that fuels both ends of the spectrum. *** I've always loved Steven Colbert's analysis: "Of course, they're checking personal phone records looking for terrorists. If you've ever called Verizon Wireless for customer service, pretty soon you're GOING to become a terrorist!"
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