Stone’s portrait of a
controversial figure highlights the good-faith and civil-rights–oriented side
of a young man who, in real life, is accused of endangering national security
interests
Sixteenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
Subsections below:
A mini director’s dossier on Oliver Stone
Snowden’s story as grist for Stone’s mill
Stone’s treatment is brought to a subject with a modest side
Ed and his personal life, along with his work
Ed’s girl as a sweetening element
Ed’s shadowy last employer
[Edits 11/28/16. Edits 12/30/16; Part 2 will not be presented; see the December 30 entry on my other blog for an explanation.]
In this season of “creepy clowns”
conducting their business all around the U.S., including one running for
president, I don’t want to add to unease with any sense that this entry is saying
something political or subversive. I am reviewing a film, in a deliberately
narrowed way, for its largely esthetic/story side, as I will make clear again
below. In a way, I am like someone in a roomful of female millennials where the
charge is to speak about Woody Allen, and I am choosing only to speak about his
cologne.
##
I was heartened to see that
there was success on 9/11 weekend for Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Sully, starring Tom Hanks as the airline
pilot Chesley Sullenberger who, in January 2009, shepherded the “Miracle on the
Hudson” where he managed to land a jet on the Hudson River after its engines had
failed on sucking in birds. It seems that, on this past 9/11 weekend, people—at
least older ones—were in the mood for a gripping tale about good, old-fashioned
heroic behavior.
I wasn’t going to see Sully, in part because I felt I knew the
story well enough and in part because my resources for film-theater-going in
recent times are slim, but I had another film in mind to see at the multiplex
in Rockaway Township, N.J., that I’ve gone to in recent years (where I have
seen the last three films that I’ve seen in the theater since summer 2015). As
before, I will be a bit sketchy and impressionistic here, but want to give at
least a cursory look so as to interest probably-select viewers in it before it
has disappeared from theaters (if it hasn’t already).
A mini director’s dossier on Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone is an interesting director, and I covered his Nixon (1995) on this blog in 2012. If
you don’t mind my early (2012) blog attempts (mostly on this blog), which are a
bit rough in execution, you can see the first part of that review here and the second here.
Stone, in some vague way, has
long struck me as if he was among the big Baby Boomer directors who came of
professional age in the 1970s (e.g., Coppola [actually a bit older than a
Boomer], Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman [also older than a Boomer], and others,
some less talked about today), but he actually only started to flourish in the
1980s. He had written the adapted screenplay (for which he won an Oscar) for Midnight Express (1978), and had written
the screenplay for Scarface (1983),
directed by Brian De Palma; then his first major feature film as a director was
Salvador (1986). His first major hit,
both a box-office success and as winning critical acclaim, was Platoon (1986), which he made all the
more convincing since he is the only film director of his ilk who had served in
Vietnam, and as a footsoldier at that. (I’m pretty sure I saw Platoon in the theater in late 1986 or
early 1987.)
He followed Platoon up with Wall Street
(1987), with its famous character of law-unto-himself Gordon Gekko, played by
Michael Douglas. Central characters in both films were played by the actor
Charlie Sheen (adding the irony that he was the son of Martin Sheen, a central
actor in Apocalypse Now [1979],
meaning that two family members had central roles in some of the most
noteworthy American films on the Vietnam War). Both films had Sheen as a sort
of earnest, young up-and-comer who gets indoctrinated into a larger system that
is ambiguous at best.
It didn’t take Stone long to
start accumulating an oeuvre and critical esteem that put him on an exalted
echelon, though he about as quickly became regarded as a sort of ideological maverick.
He became quite recognizable for his style of work, which included a sort of
visual flashiness that could make for excitement; but he was often
controversial, when he could present works like JFK (1991), which contained some discredited crackpot theorizing on
the source of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He would also, less
politically tendentious, make The Doors
(1991), a sort of labor of love for him, I guess. This latter film was never
going to be a hit with the likes of me, because though that rock group seems to
have especially entranced those who lived through the late ’60s and early ’70s
enough to feel it exemplified central bearings of modern civilization (Coppola,
even, had originally considered scoring all, or most of, Apocalypse Now to Doors music), I always felt the group was a
little pretentious and flimsy. (End note
1)
In any event, Stone gave the
group a psychedelic treatment in the film, which would have appealed to
exponents of late ’60s “epistemology and ontology.” (My skepticism is rather
based on this sort of idea: in an obituary years ago of one of the members of
the group the Mamas and the Papas, in I think The New York Times, it was noted that the group had an “acid trip”
together at some point, and that this marked a historical watershed point for
them, or such. It’s only the older Baby Boomers who would find this kind of
thing of news-worthy significance.)
In case it seems that Stone was mainly
an old cultural curator of the “takings of stands” of the late ’60s and early
’70s, he embraced a range of topics/themes in his films, which included Natural Born Killers (1994), which
seemed to critique one strain of modern celebrity culture; and even, well along
in his career, he made Alexander (2004),
a sort of historical treatment of the ancient figure Alexander the Great. The latter
film was financed by foreign money, and it had an air of being of strange taste
for something that would be released in the U.S. (I saw it in the theater), and
I saw it had Stone’s trademark touches (such as a gliding-camera look at a
bacchanal) without seeming just like a weird sellout. (Both of these films were
critically panned, at least by Leonard Maltin. I’m not recommending them—just suggesting
Stone’s range [or capacity for missteps].)
I’m glad I saw and reviewed
Stone’s Nixon, though for a better
historical education I would definitely advise reading on that old president from
varied, more-scholarly sources (or even, for another, fairly sober cinematic taste,
seeing the Ron Howard–directed Frost/Nixon
[2008], which I reviewed on this blog in fall 2013). Some of what weaves its
way through Stone’s film (not in a voluminous amount) is his tendentious
philosophizing about the source of cultural/political evil, originating in
about World War II, that reached its full bloom in the corpse flower of Nixon
(and this was the sort of arcane [or playfully putative] theorizing that the
likes of Thomas Pynchon would add as a sort of amusing accent to his
encyclopedic novel Gravity’s Rainbow
[1973], such as when he talks about the Combine [I think it is] and the Furies).
Such theorizing in Stone’s film struck me as marring an otherwise often-worthy try
at getting stuffed into a navigable film the odyssey-like life of the history-making
man (played by the hardworking Anthony Hopkins) whom satirical fiction writer
Robert Coover, in The Public Burning,
called the Fighting Quaker.
Snowden’s story as grist for Stone’s mill
In terms of being a
writer/director who both has embraced the idea of critiquing, in
archetypal-story fashion, what the U.S. is doing when it comes to falling away
from its ideals (from the “better angels of its nature,” so to speak) and has
presented the sort of now-old-fashioned odyssey-like story about real-life
individuals that could marry brave action with subjective/altered-states phases
in life, Stone seemed a good choice for doing a film on the controversial (and
not-fully-understood) Edward Snowden, if anyone had to.
That is, not just due to his
politics, Stone seemed apt for this project because he could bring to it the
kind of story that seems increasingly fading within the mist created by
superhero franchises and other fantasy fare: Stone knew what people liked in
the 1960s and ’70s, and figured it was still the “language” to put some stories
in: a lone man up against a morally alien system who could rely on little more
than his own wits, back, and strength, and sometimes may be sent reeling into
altered-senses conditions by the extreme challenges that he as a non-fantasy individual was facing.
Snowden, of course, when he is
lauded, is known for having pointed out that the National Security Agency, for
which he had worked as a contractor and from which he was now a sort of
defector, was routinely able to access complete information on phone calls of
any average Americans (in its overall mission to comb for national-security
threats; I’m not an expert on this area at all, so for some additional info,
see here). As it happened, the
relevant bulk-information program was ruled illegal by a court subsequent to
Snowden’s disclosure (particularly regarding how Verizon had been assisting the
NSA) (see here for more on many
details of the issue; I can’t vouch for this article, as it is more than I want
to fully read), and hence the program was modified in some significant way. Thus Snowden could be said to have alerted the general public to a federal program
that was in need of, and received, important reform.
Snowden also is a figure who is
polarizing enough—indeed, a sort of wanted man (for violations of espionage
laws) in federal eyes—that the U.S. had steadfastly produced statements timed
with the release of this film to remind that Snowden unjustifiably put national
security and related individuals at grave risk with his release of the huge
fund of electronic files that he stole from his job for the NSA (which he
presumably took to prove his points as a conscientious objector). Since June 2013
he has been in a sort of odd exile in Russia, after he has benefited from a
three-year grant by the Russian government to stay in that country (after he
ended up stranded there following the U.S.’s revoking his passport in mid-2013 before
he could receive asylum in a South American country, following his stay in Hong
Kong). (By the way, the Wikipedia article on him has
a large amount of information on his life, more than I ever hoped or wanted to
square with when opting to review this film.) But apparently this Russian
asylum has run out, leaving him awaiting asylum elsewhere for which he has presumably
applied. Of course, he would be tried under an espionage law if he returned to
the U.S. (absent his being granted amnesty).
A story in The New York Times Magazine several weekends back looked at how
Stone got the film made; there not only was some dicey-ness about whether
director would do it, but once Stone was committed to it, he handled the
logistics—shipping the script around to collaborators in preproduction;
communicating during production work—as if he was afraid (perhaps rightly) that
the U.S. could spy on his work, as if the project posed valid grounds for federal
suspicion (which it may have). Also, a small-scale distributor (Open Road) was
signed up for the film prior to production, the limited-auspices quality of which
disappointed Stone at first; but as a result, with the film opening widely in
its first days of release, which would be atypical of a major-marquee film
effort (the sort that would have a prior limited city-focused engagement), the
potential to release the film to a wide audience before much could be done to
blunt its business potential meant that the story could be exposed to sunlight
quickly, preventing “unfriendly forces in power” from trying to undermine it.
(My theory.)
As I hinted at the outset, I do
not want to have it thought I have a firm opinion about Snowden as to his
culpability, or not, for stealing various documents; I don’t want to state an
opinion directly in line with the “amnesty for Snowden” movement. I do want to
look at him from the narrow viewpoint of how he is portrayed, assuming his
relative innocence, as a sort of whistleblower, which is how the film generally
approaches him. I also don’t want to try to tease out much of what may be
fictional liberties the film takes as it generally presents itself as a
nonfiction introduction to the man.
Stone’s treatment is brought to a subject with a modest side
For a major-Hollywood-type film
on a controversial, still-hot-potato figure (made after studios like Sony had
passed on it), with an esteemed storytelling writer/director at the helm, I
think Stone rises to the occasion of his thrust’s largely being just to explain
(at least in main respects) who Edward Snowden is, and why—with how much
conscience—he “defected” from the NSA and released what he did.
Here, we don’t get much woolly national-cultural-decline
theory as you might find in Nixon or JFK. Stone assumes that Snowden is the
sort of assiduously-rising, pretty-average person who would appeal to the
millennials, and/or the Occupy
Wall Street types, and/or those who felt Bernie
Sanders had “the right stuff” and had a chance. So Stone apparently felt he
need not weave various story/theory-spouting “signposts” to show how the U.S.,
in its most recent history, has gone grievously astray; that, as a sort of
muted piece of “receive wisdom,” is somewhat assumed. Instead, he uses his
storytelling talents in the more elemental and unpretentious way he could,
first flowering in the sorts of bildungsromans that were Platoon and Wall Street.
You get visuals that punch up a
story about people who are largely computer geeks, and special effects that
show just what it means that so much unexpected spying can be going on that you
suddenly fastidiously see reason to put a Band-Aid over your computer’s camera
lest you be watched while your attractive girlfriend is having sex with you on
a summer night. When Snowden, whose epilepsy I didn’t know about, has a grand
mal seizure, Stone shows the phantasmagoric sense with which this sort of
experience could visually be depicted.
Apparently this story does weave
fictional elements into the stew of real-life stuff, and I say right now (as
deliberately limits this review’s incisiveness) I don’t want to spend a lot of
time parsing this out, the way I did—with good reason—with the 2015 film Truth back in August. I don’t think
Stone is being creatively mischievous (or hairy-theory-bolstering) with this so
much as just trying to sweeten up a story to get the points about exposing unbridled
spying by the federal government on its own citizens made more intuitively.
So, for example, there is a
preceptor in the CIA for Snowden, Corbin O’Brien (Rhys Ifans), who seems suitably ambiguous as a veteran
true-believer spy (who gives off a scent of being a career-jaded, worldly-wise
lizard) who feels he can and should cultivate a spook in his own image in
Snowden. This figure seems, to me on two viewings of the film, convincingly-enough
real (i.e., enough “part of the real-life source material”) in how he weaves
into the film (though the way he seems to slot into expositional functions may
raise suspicions); he even becomes more menacing later on, as we might expect
story-wise (when he is aware of Snowden being less trustworthy than before).
Anyway, a review in The Star-Ledger
pointed out O’Brien is a fictional device. (End note 2)
I don’t think this, in
particular, means Stone is taking too much of a liberty or being a crank with
this device, but I also want to limit my considerations of this film to what
seems true (enough) and what works.
Ed and his personal life, along with his work
I’ve never seen actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a film before, and I
thought he was pretty good as Edward Snowden (and he made the character
simpatico enough that I turned to noting him familiarly as “Ed” in my
during-the-film notes). In fact, the two lead actors, the other being Shailene Woodley as Ed’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills,
etch their characters pretty well—enough that you can identify with them, and
they carry you through what else in the film may take more work to “identify
with.” Gordon-Levitt presents Ed as nothing so much as an up-and-coming
computer whiz—I didn’t realize that, if the film has this right, Snowden never
finished high school [update 12/30/16: According to a recent New York Times article, Snowden got an HS equivalency diploma]—who tried for the Army in 2004, and received an
administrative discharge because his legs were accumulating fractures from
basic training, and one morning he fell in his barracks and broke a leg
further. End of Army career.
Ed, still intent on serving his
country, then opted to join the CIA in 2006, and here is where he meets Corbin
O’Brien, in an intriguing interview session where, suitably enough, the
discriminating, rather dour O’Brien seems to reject Ed at first, then accepts
him. The film then follows Ed through his multi-phase career from 2006 through
2013, from the relatively gung-ho George W. Bush years to the more ambiguous,
Internet-wracked modern years: as a matter of narrative strategy (i.e., a
flashback structure), the story weaves between (1) the “present-day” tense
situation, the sort of “frame” of the story, of Ed being about to release his
secrets to a bevy of journalists, including some from the U.K. publication The Guardian, in a hotel in Hong Kong,
and (2) sequential phases in his career from 2004 up to then.
I hope to look in more detail at
Ed’s career, and the nature of his employment, in Part 2, but I will first take
a look at Lindsay Mills, his girlfriend.
Ed’s girl as a sweetening element
Critics in different
publications (e.g., Time magazine) have
remarked as if the film isn’t too exciting, or as if Stone punted, or something.
I think he did well enough, in terms of providing enlightenment, to the extent
cinema can do this, on the “industry” of computer geeks in positions of
potential spying (and access to what would be considered top-secret government
doings). Stone, as you know, is the kind of director who can photo someone
vacuuming a living room and make it look exciting. Then you will stop and say,
“But this is still someone vacuuming a living room.” Well, computer geeks
huddled over flat-screen computers, and Ed’s engaging in a sort of
young-person’s hugger-mugger with a more wise-assed geek (like a character
named, I think, Gabriel Sole [supposed to be a biblical allusion??]) is not
exactly some Spandex-bedecked superhero flying through the city air on a
spider-silk thread. Who expected this here? If you did, puh-lease.
(And by the way, I am not a geek
working in a basement and living on Ramen noodles and caffeine. I’m an old
editor. There is a difference—not much, but a significant enough amount.)
So Stone’s challenge is not just
to show what it means for cloistered geeks in Hawaii, maybe, to be able to
listen in (or know surprisingly much about) your phone conversations with your BFF
Ashleigh, but to show what kind of man we have here. A big-souled hero? Turns
out, except for his computer-apt high IQ, he’s a fairly average millennial, it
seems.
Shailene Woodley as the
girlfriend I think provides a lot of help to this film. I had remarked somewhat
critically about her in my 2013 review of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) (see my review
here); I thought she came across there as
a thin-voiced brat to an extent, but I didn’t dismiss the actress completely,
out of hand. I am happy to say, and want to supplement that review with this,
that her delivery of her Lindsay character is good, well-rounded, and hearty.
Lindsay is the liberal young
woman posing a counterpoint to Ed’s conservative Army-apt striver (OK, so the
dichotomy of political types is schematic). They met on a dating website, it
seems, but love is so often blind (but well-meaning), and except for one or two
pauses in their relationship through the years of the story here, they remain
an item. She wants to be his wife (or steadfast companion), and in the
different hopeful homes they set up for themselves, she wants the stability of
a normal life, while (rather like an Army careerist) he has to move to
different locations from time to time.
She sticks with him through
much; when he has the first epileptic seizure seen in the film, she obviously wants
to help him as a steady “rock.” (We never hear a lot about his birth family.
One of the few things is that his mother was on a number of meds for something,
he says, which we suspect helps explain his epilepsy—so Mom was epileptic too?
But other than that, we hear [I think] next to nothing about his parents. [The
Wikipedia article on him has a lot to fill out the picture of his birth family.])
Lindsay seems rather privileged;
there is actually a set of parents she goes home to, we find (the father seems
rather old for her dad, doesn’t he?). But as Ed’s companion, she seems to be
some kind of artist. She takes photos, and does some kind of visual art. We
find some work or two of hers to feature her own image. We might wonder, is she
some kind of (today’s pop-critical obsession) narcissist? Why art featuring
herself?
Then we have to remember,
presumably when Stone sat with some producing personages and heard the demands
he had to meet in order to get this film adequate distribution (and he thought
to himself, “Oh, shit!,” because in
the old days of Platoon it wasn’t
like this), he realized that not only did he need a palatable female actress
who would bring in the young male Turks—whether yuppie working in digital-media shit,
or tattooed beer-drinker getting off work at the construction site—but someone
whose pretty visage would be seen in numerous shots, and who—yes, how else
explain it?—would also turn out to depict a woman with a (transient) career of
seeming to teach pole-dancing, so we can see her lithe figure writhing around a
pole.
I’m not making this up. I’m
following the movie.
Woodley with her big, brown
eyes, slender nose, rather thin body, and warm manner seems fine as an eminent
millennial girlfriend of a computer whiz here. (Geeks in the audience could
enjoy some wish-fulfillment suggestions: “This could happen to me, too!!”) And as I suggested, her
performance traces the rather rounded nature of Lindsay here, complete with
being rather at the end of her rope, sometimes, with Ed’s situation regarding
his work (with stark changes including quitting on principle, or a need to move
a great distance because of the type of remotely located opportunities inherent
in his line of work).
(At the end of the film, titles
explain what is up with the real Ed, who appears in a small set of shots at the
end of the film—his face is what emerges [as the last face seen in the film] to
the right of the computer entity at the mass computer conference near the end,
while Gordon-Levitt’s face has previously emerged to the left. Ed is still in Russia , and it
turns out Lindsay Mills moved there to join him. Wouldn’t it be funny if the
last title said Lindsay Mills didn’t go to join him, but actress Shailene Woodley
did?)
Ed’s shadowy last employer
Who was Ed’s employer when he
defected from his job in 2013? Was it the NSA? No, it was a contractor—Booz
Allen Hamilton, which today is (alternatively?) called Strategy& (yes, that’s not a typo). What is Booz Allen
Hamilton? A sort of temp agency for big-league geeks? A consulting firm that
provides dubious managing consulting?
I’m not suggesting that if Booz
Allen Hamilton is questionable, this then helps explain that Ed was “a bad
apple not caught in time, by an erratic consulting company” or that this
somehow “necessarily” explains that, or how, Ed was “bad to leak government
secrets as he did.” Perhaps Ed was one of the few sterling professionals to
work for that firm. We need to know more about the firm. (60 Minutes, what do you have on Booz Allen Hamilton?)
Is it a place that, with all
else, has branched out from years of federal work to now serving smaller-time
private companies, and offering managerial consultants who don’t know the first
thing about the industry they are meddling in, and bollix things up there big-time?
Maybe we’ll see in Part 2, which
may not be available for several weeks.
End note 1. Some of the Doors’ songs, like the bouncy “Peace Frog,”
the workmanlike “Roadhouse Blues,” and a few others that frequently turn up on
old-hits radio, I liked and/or found memorable (I even had a cassette tape of
their music in 1980, which I played on a car stereo). But it always seemed it
was older Baby Boomers who were impressed enough by the Doors to see them as a
sort of infectious rock on the musical surface and a kind of shadowy Rimbaud
poetry in Jim Morrison’s lyrics (I never warmed to Morrison). The song “The
End,” which famously underscores the hypnotic beginning of Apocalypse Now, I remember feeling, when I first saw the film in
September 1979, as the kind of music choice that was “a director’s misstep in
trying to be cool and not making it.” (Just because I had a tape of their music
in 1980 didn’t mean I would admire how the music was used in the film in 1979.)
But I’ve seen the film so many times in years since, and have grown to love it
so much—and the film has more widely come to be an “artifact reflecting an old
time” 30+ years later—that the song seems the kind of 1967-era period piece,
even with its mild pretentiousness, that suits the film well enough (the film
is set in about 1970); and of course those of us who were sentient in the 1970s
can see that (though this would seem trivial to millennials) there are certain
little mid-1970s cultural values in the doings depicted in the film that were
anachronistic to ascribe to the earlier Vietnam period that the film is set in:
such was cultural change in those days that even about six years could mean a relative
sea change in middle-class cultural bearings.
