by & DAVID WALSH
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Snowden
Directed by Oliver Stone; co-written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald
Veteran American filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has been directing since the mid-1980s, has made a movie about National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden follows its titular character’s evolution from his enlistment in 2004 in the US Army Reserve as a Special Forces candidate, at which time he was a “patriot” and firm supporter of the war in Iraq, to his decision in 2013 to expose the NSA’s illegal efforts at universal surveillance.
Stone’s film is a serious effort and done with integrity. Snowden opened in North America on September 16, and will have been released in some 20 countries by the end of this week. That millions will watch a work offering a generally sympathetic portrait of Snowden, an individual denounced by the US government and media as a “traitor,” has considerable significance. It speaks to the immense (and growing) divide between official public opinion and the sentiments and opinions of wide layers of the population. Among young people in particular, Snowden is a highly admired figure.
The film opens in June 2013 in Hong Kong with the encounter between Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), now in hiding, documentary maker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and radical journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). They are soon joined by Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) of the Guardian, which is planning—with some reluctance—to publish portions of Snowden’s cache of secret NSA documents. Poitras is shooting video for what will become the documentary Citizenfour (2014).
The atmosphere inside the luxury Mira Hotel is extremely tense. Snowden has placed pillows against the door, cell phones are stored in the microwave to prevent the NSA or CIA from zeroing in on the meeting place. Snowden begins to educate the journalists and filmmaker about the pervasiveness of NSA spying. As Poitras’ film recounts, in one of the first emails she received from Snowden, he had informed her “that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, site you visit, and subject line you type is in the hands of a system, whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.”
After the Hong Kong sequence, Stone’s film returns to Snowden’s days in the US Army Reserve in Ft. Benning, Georgia. He is still under the influence of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” propaganda. After injuries lead to his discharge from the military, he finds his way to the CIA. He comes under the tutelage of agency instructor and eventual mentor Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans). O’Brian tells the recruits in their first session that if there is “another 9/11, it will be your fault.”
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