Reality Winner is the ideal poster child of the age of the internet, her name sticks and is full of meaning, probably made up but actually isn’t and is the most ironic name ever. That moniker was the one used by late night shows to the delight of many, in 2017, for a whistleblower who saw it fit to reveal how the Russians meddled with the Presidential elections in 2016 only to be demonized by cable news and feasted on by the Trump administration.
The name (and those late night bits) is acknowledged a lot in Winner, the second film about her in less than a year (the other being HBO’s Reality, taking the other obvious title option). Directed by Susanna Fogel (Cat Person, Booksmart) and adapted from an essay written by Kerry Howley, the film appears to enjoy providing information that it presumes the audience already knows. What the straight up biopic would suggest Winner simply states this, but she wont say anything about what happened from the time she leaked the evidence proving that the government was lying to its citizens, Reality (Coda’s Emilia Jones) explains in voiceover in the introduction. “Yeah, they don’t like it when you do that.”
Yeah, they don’t like it when you do that. Such jazzy flourishes fourth wall breaks of cheeky voiceover confessionals, the subject herself making snappy with the audience have now themselves become a norm along the lines of such fun blends of fact, interpretation and person that those watched in loose biopics like Molly’s Game and I, Tonya. As in those films, she was famous but she was also an infamous woman with more of a story to tell. Ironically enough, Winner’s forthrightness prevents the film from completing such tasks.
For starters, Winner, which had its premiere at the Sundance film festival, is not a repeat of Reality, which is based on a stage play by Tina Satter about the actual interrogation that Winner went through in May 2017. The film featuring Sydney Sweeney is a gripping and powerful psychological thriller showing how oppressive the system is in deconstructing a person. Taking a step back, Winner, rushes through the episodic highlights from her early life to the time she served four years in jail, and talks about the political act which she regrets caused apathy in people.
Through hills and battles, she sees it all, nurtured by her father Ron, who for many years was an unemployed aspiring author with a bitter outlook on life. It was Ron who illustrated the most important lesson from the most important day of her childhood, which, of course, was September 11: only violence can be avoided by understanding each other. Not just former school but a teenager who seeks to create makes a lot of sense most likely due to her extraordinary ability she starts to self educate in Arabic in Texas one of many reasons why she began to be portrayed in a court as someone who supports terroris much to the confusion of her strait laced social worker mother Billie and her sane sibling Brittany.
The film wastes no time and goes straight to the point, enriched with fast paced dialogues, and probably her own self narration that the subject of Almost Isn’t Good Enough was reported about by Howley in 2017 for New York Magazine. Reality is scouted by the US military due to her incredible ability to learn languages, skips college, and enlists. During her time working in the force she learns Dari and Pashto languages and requests for an assignment in Afghanistan. This is not where the story ends. She is stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland, working as a translator of tapped phone conversations of people and sometimes children from several countries for the drone operators to know the targets.
Winner’s narrative gaps resonate with her tortured self. To counter the brutal shame and the cacophony of bad news ringing in her head, she engages in an affair with a bartender, Andre (Danny Ramirez), as well as a punishing workout routine. (Another of the film’s great achievements is Anastasia Magoutas’s costume design for the film: the Reality’s ultimate anti style, tomboyish fashion that somehow still manages to look like it is taken from the mid 2010s.) Ultimately, she ends up working as a private contractor for the National Security Agency. Winner feels quick even at 103 minutes; we are told of her disillusionment without delving too deep, her reasons for committing the crime, and how she did so, which is all rather dull and, within the given circumstances, quite reasonable. Her treatment by the government however, absolutely spine chilling.
Howley emerges as a fascinating and wittily macabre writer of non fiction, and the screenplay she has written has the sorts of wry comments and unabashed candidness of a friend; her portrayal of Winner, combined with Jones’ nice turn as a sweet but cranky liberal, provides pleasant company. And yet it’s difficult to avoid the sense that the narrative is aesthetically too resolved, too stylishly twisted into the shape of a standard anti standard billboard. While the father daughter relationship between Reality and her father and Andre are beautifully captured in quick flashes, Brittany and Billie possess an unsettling inconsistency. In the jigsaw puzzle of the real Reality Winner, some pieces are definitely absent, more background begging to be filled in.
Nevertheless, in terms of trend based yet ‘based on truth’ literature, Winner is certainly among the better ones, being both fun and educational at the same time. Reality Winner may have, for some time now, lost unreasonably, but in this rendition of her story, things do turn around for her in the end.
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