Producers: Amanda Phillips, Susanna Fogel, Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein, Scott Budnick and Ameet Shukla Director: Susanna Fogel Screenplay: Kerry Howley and Susanna Fogel Cast: Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, Zach Galifianakis, Annelise Pollmann, Kathryn Newton, Danny Ramirez, Averie Peters, Shannon Berry, Kristian Jordan, Sam Duke, Dan De Jaeger and Gino Anania Distributor: Vertical
Grade: C+
Last year’s HBO film by Tina Satter about Reality Winner, the Texas-born woman convicted in 2018 of revealing classified government information, was titled “Reality.” Now Susanna Fogel offers a biographical comedy-drama about her, ironically called “Winner.” This might be the first pair of films to divide their subject’s name in such a fashion.
Satter’s treatment, starring Sydney Sweeney, was actually very limited, being a dramatization of the initial interrogation of Winner by the FBI team headed by an agent named Garrick (Josh Hamilton) that ended in her arrest. Derived entirely from the actual transcript of that surprise interview at Winner’s home, with only a few brief flashbacks at significant points, the script was compellingly focused but confined in scope.
Fogel’s film, written by her and Kerry Howley, a practitioner of literary nonfiction (including the 2017 New York Magazine article “Who Is Reality Winner?”), is by contrast, a more conventional biographical film, beginning with Winner’s childhood and proceeding chronologically through her career, arrest, trial and incarceration while surrounding her with family, friends, colleagues and antagonists. It also can be called authorized, at least loosely, in that it portrays Winner as she probably wants to be seen, and her punishment by the authorities as a case of politically-motivated excess.
With a jaunty tone that’s maintained until the painful last act, Reality is introduced here as a precocious, principled nine-year old (Annelise Pollmann) whose views on right and wrong—as well as an inclination to take impetuous action when she sees a perceived injustice—have been molded by her father Ron (Zach Galifianakis). Ron is depicted as an unabashedly left-leaning intellectual (although his credentials in that regard may be questioned by anybody who notes his mispronunciation of “Evelyn,” as in “Waugh”). He’s also a writer who does little writing, still feeling the effects of a car accident he’d been involved in some time ago, and is addicted to painkillers and alcohol. His wife Billie (Connie Britton), on the other hand, is a pragmatic, down-to-earth soul, and also the family breadwinner; Reality’s older sister Brittany (Averie Peters) takes after her, later (as played by Kathryn Newton) going off to college and marrying.
Influenced by Ron to harbor suspicions of any form of authority and (after 9/11) to look on Islam without the prejudice arising from nationalist anger and stoked by politics, Reality teaches herself Arabic while in high school, an accomplishment noted by a pushy Air Force recruiter (Gino Anania) who visits the school. But while uninterested in his maladroit advances, Reality (now played by Emilia Jones) chooses to forego college and enter the service, hoping to channel her linguistic aptitude to humanitarian ends. At a military base in nearby Kingsville, she studies Dari and Farsi, and later Pashto, hoping to be sent to Afghanistan to work with the locals. Instead, she winds up at Fort Meade in Maryland, where her language facility is used to monitor and translate conversations that lead to drone strikes on presumed enemies. She also starts a romantic relationship with an engaging boyfriend (Danny Ramirez) who, like her, is an animal lover.
But dissatisfied with her job, she leaves the military (and Danny), hoping to join an NGO doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan. Rejected because of her lack of a degree, she instead goes to work at a firm doing contract research for the NSA; there she’s constantly bombarded by televisions tuned to Fox News, where reports of Russian hacking during the 2016 election are denounced as a hoax. On her computer, however, sits a classified file with evidence of the hacking. Infuriated by the government’s lack of honesty with the public, she prints out the file and mails it to an online news site open to publishing such secret material. Unfortunately for Winner, in doing so she left a trail the FBI was able to follow, and given the politically sensitive nature of the content, the authorities dealt with her severely, supposedly because the file revealed intelligence sources and methods but actually because it was politically sensitive. “Winner” argues that the stern conduct of the trial and the cruelty of her imprisonment represented political retribution.
This is a curiously hybrid film, the first half a genial portrait of a seemingly ordinary American girl who’s actually quite extraordinary, and the second turning serious as her reaction to official deception leads her to decisions that bring the full weight of governmental power to bear against her. Jones is intense in both, but her best efforts, and those of Fogel and editor Joseph Krings, never succeed in making Reality entirely credible, or in injecting much tension into her story. More successful, because the characters are less complicated, are Galifianakis and Britton, who present contrasting parental styles—his looser, though hardly indifferent and hers more practical if no less supportive; the former is all the more impressive because the role represents a semi-dramatic stretch for him. The rest of the cast is fine, especially those who play the rudely officious types Winner frequently bumps up against; but Ramirez is a standout as a thoroughly likable fellow who can’t fully understand Winner’s mindset.
Technically too the film is more than adequate, with Steve Yedlin’s straightforward cinematography complemented by Krings’s efficient editing, while Sara J. White’s production design and Anastasia Magoutas’ costumes provide convincing background. Heather McIntosh’s score is unobtrusive.
At one point Winner protests that she’s no Edward Snowden, but this film about her is actually a mite more intriguing than Oliver Stone’s about him. Still, its strangely jarring tonal shifts, while understandable as a creative choice, are, in the end, damaging to its overall impact.