Oliver Stone’s Snowden turns whistleblowing into a race against the clock

Oliver Stone’s Snowden wants to be a thriller about a man who beat the clock. Its best scene is a stopwatch.

Trailer, via Open Road Films.

The 38-Minute Exercise

At “The Hill,” CIA trainees build a covert communications network in their hometown, delete it, then rebuild it in eight hours or less. Five hours is the average. Edward Snowden, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, does it in 38 minutes. Deputy Director Corbin O’Brian, played by Rhys Ifans, takes notice.

That sequence is the whole movie in miniature: a gifted technician, a system that measures him, and a mentor who mistakes speed for loyalty. Everything after it is slower.

What the Film Covers

Snowden is a 2016 biographical thriller directed by Stone and written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. It runs 135 minutes and draws on two books: The Snowden Files (2014) by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus (2015) by Anatoly Kucherena.

The film opens in 2013, in Hong Kong, where Snowden meets documentarian Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald to discuss releasing the classified material he holds on illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. Poitras later made Citizenfour about that meeting, and footage from it appears in the film.

Then it goes back. In 2004 Snowden is in basic training, bound for Special Forces, until he fractures his tibia and gets an administrative discharge. He applies to the CIA instead. The screening goes badly until O’Brian decides to take a chance on him.

The Cast Around Him

Gordon-Levitt carries the middle stretch, and the supporting roster is deep:

• Shailene Woodley as Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend, met through a dating website
• Melissa Leo as Laura Poitras
• Zachary Quinto as Glenn Greenwald
• Tom Wilkinson as Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian defense and intelligence correspondent
• Rhys Ifans as Corbin O’Brian
• Nicolas Cage as Hank Forrester, a former US intelligence official
• Timothy Olyphant as a CIA agent who befriends Snowden before he leaves for Russia
• LaKeith Stanfield as an NSA co-worker and close friend
• Scott Eastwood as Trevor James
• Ben Schnetzer as Gabriel Sol
• Joely Richardson as Janine Gibson

Kucherena, Snowden’s Russian attorney and the author of Time of the Octopus, plays a Russian diplomat in a Geneva scene.

The Road to Release

The production was an international co-production of Germany, France and the United States. Gordon-Levitt pledged his entire salary to “help facilitate the conversation” about technology and democracy.

Where the Money Went

Snowden grossed $37.3 million worldwide against a $40 million budget. It did not make its money back.

The reviews were mixed, praising Gordon-Levitt and faulting Stone’s direction. That split is fair, and it is also the most interesting thing about the film. Gordon-Levitt does the work of a man who believes he is inside a machine he can still steer. Stone, who has spent a career on whistleblowers and the state that hunts them, cannot decide whether he is making a procedural or a sermon, and the film keeps stopping to explain itself.

What Actually Lands

The Hong Kong frame is the right structure and the wrong emphasis. The meeting with Poitras and Greenwald is the story’s pressure point — a man deciding, in a hotel room, to hand over the thing that ends his old life. Stone treats it as a destination. The training sequences, which should be setup, are livelier.

The film is at its best when it is concrete: the eight-hour rebuild, the 38-minute answer, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act explained as warrant requests approved by a panel of judges appointed by the Chief Justice. It is at its worst when it tells you how to feel about all of it.

This is a competent, well-cast, over-explained movie about a subject that resists tidy drama. The 38 minutes are worth the ticket. What surrounds them is a lecture.

Edward Snowden · Joseph Gordon-Levitt · movie review · NSA surveillance · Oliver Stone · Snowden