Title: Reality
Rating: 4 Stars
This film is about Reality Winner. For those that need a refresher, back in 2017 Winner was arrested for downloading a classified document and leaking it to The Intercept, an investigative web site. She ultimately ended up pleading guilty and was sentenced to around five years. She served a couple of years, was released early due to good behavior, and is paroled somewhere in Texas.
This film concentrates on her arrest. When I mean concentrates, I mean to an exclusive extent. The FBI recorded everything from their initial contact with her all the way to her being led away in handcuffs. The dialog for this film is composed entirely from this recording.
It’s not quite done in real time, but it’s close. At one point, there was a caption in the film that said that the following took place at the 86th minute of the recording while the film, at that point, was somewhere between an hour and an hour ten.
The first thing that you’ll notice about the film is the awkward quality of the dialog. There are sentences that don’t make sense. There are sentences that start in one direction and end in another. Words are misused. There are awkward coughs. There are innumerable awkward pauses.
This brought back dark memories of the novel JR, written by William Gaddis. Way back in 2015, when I was suffering through James’ The Golden Bowl, I compared it to the differently unreadable JR (read about it here). To boil it down, in JR, Gaddis tried to exactly replicate normal human verbal communication. The resulting mishmash was incredibly difficult to understand, making the novel at times virtually incompressible.
The challenge is that our brains are uniquely designed to understand the verbal chop suey that takes place during normal conversation and can seemingly effortlessly process it. However, divorce us from that context and our brain quickly gets bogged down. Watching a film you have the expectation of some kind of structure to the dialog. In a typical film, even characters that are portrayed as being poorly educated actually speak in a more structured form than everyday colloquial conversation.
Listening to the choppy dialog of the actual interrogation and comparing that to normal cinematic interrogations was eye opening. Once again I was reminded of how facile our oral communication capabilities are.
Because the film essentially just consists of an interview, there are really only three roles. The three main characters are Reality (Sydney Sweeney), Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis), and Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton). A couple of other actors have lines but are not named. Probably not surprising, the film is based upon a play (Is This A Room). Because the action is basically the dialog, the film certainly felt like a play brought to screen.
Of the three, Sweeney has the most to do and she does outstanding work. She has to balance being confused by the agents’ sudden appearance, being cooperative once she knows she’s under suspicion, confessing a little bit at a time as she learns how much they know, to breaking down and confessing all once she understands there is no getting away with it. It’s a meaty role and she does an outstanding job.
The interview text was pretty dry and, as I’ve said, choppy. It was interesting how the choices that the actors made in delivering the lines as well as the movement of the cameras during the interrogation and the background music together made for a pretty compelling film.
It also cast light on the severity of Winner’s punishment. After all, she only downloaded one classified file. It wasn’t a list of Russian double agents. It wasn’t our crown jewel of nuclear secrets. It wasn’t our strategy of winning a war against China. It was a document describing how Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 election for Trump’s benefit. If a document is classified, then an individual does not have the right to disseminate it because they think it should. Winner was clearly legally in the wrong. However, this scarcely seems to be a traitorous action. This is especially true when you compare that to the more recent case of Jack Teixeira, who allegedly downloaded hundreds of documents, including Ukraine war plans, to his online buddies, apparently just for clout. To be sentenced to five years for sharing that one document seems pretty unfair.
Weighing in at around eighty minutes or so, this was a quick film to watch and, given its innovative approach, was entertaining to watch.
dorkenstein 