‘Reality’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Is Outstanding as Whistleblower Reality Winner in a Clever, Gripping Docudrama – Variety
Within the extensively lined story of the U.S. intelligence operative harshly sentenced in 2018 for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to The Intercept, the unintentional (in)appropriateness of the operative’s identify was all the time an eyecatching element. May one in all latest actuality’s most extremely public losers really be referred to as Actuality Winner? Playwright Tina Satter’s enormously compelling film-directing debut provides one other layer of cosmic irony to that nominative determinism. In utilizing the title “Actuality,” and being scripted verbatim from exchanges recorded by the FBI throughout Winner’s 2017 shock interrogation, Satter not solely vividly revisits the story, she additionally makes us query the very relationship between a story movie and the reality it claims to show. Actuality could be stranger than fiction, however “Actuality” fuses the 2 to turn into stranger, and extra riveting, nonetheless.
One main, electrifying connection between the info of the case and their dramatization is offered by a revelatory Sydney Sweeney, taking part in Winner so convincingly that it’s laborious to recollect her because the sardonic, pampered teen in “The White Lotus,’ or the nice-girl-turned-nasty in “Euphoria.” From the second Winner, an ex-USAF Airman fluent in Farsi, Pashto and Dari and dealing as a translator for an NSA contractor, arrives again to her small home in Augusta, Ga., to find the FBI ready for her, Sweeney’s each flicker of emotion, micro-reaction, evasion and retraction, is completely plausible.
She’s matched in type by Josh Hamilton as Agent Garrick and Marchánt Davis as Agent Taylor, the 2 males accountable for her questioning. Lots of their dialog is banal: Whereas main their suspect towards a confession, they chat amiably about Winner’s rescue canine, who’s penned up within the yard, often barking. They joke about her obese cat and are impressed by her crossfit routine and fondness for firearms. And but the stress by no means lags, it solely ratchets up as Winner, who tasks precise innocence and incomprehension proper till she caves and admits that the leak got here from her, step by step realizes the sheer magnitude of the difficulty she is in.
The drama has already been confirmed to work, within the type of Satter’s stage play based mostly on the identical textual content. What’s much less anticipated, nonetheless, is simply how nicely “Actuality” lives within the cinematic type. And it’s not due to any picturesque areas — small surprise Satter’s play was titled “Is This a Room?” when the disused kitchen add-on the place it largely takes place was described by Winner herself as “creepy” and appears extra like a CIA blacksite. As an alternative, it turns into cinematic within the fluidity and precision of Paul Yee’s glorious closed-space cinematography, and within the pacing of Jennifer Vecchiarello and Ron Dulin’s enhancing, which is typically jittery and typically virtually unbearably sedate, as Winner observes a snail on the windowsill, or listens to the noises of the brokers tramping by way of her home.
However even with such professional filmmaking at her disposal, and along with her forged note-perfect in delivering each “um” and each cough, each non-sequitur and each mumbled apart (the transcript is on the market on-line if you wish to evaluate), Satter’s method regularly insists we not take every thing at face worth, and mistrust our personal impulses to droop disbelief. After we come across a second the place the transcript was censored, the picture sparkles and glitches, typically erasing the characters altogether as if Winner herself have been being redacted. Even the pruning of the transcript is highlighted: At numerous junctures a title seems indicating how far we’re into the recording, which marks out each the movie’s grounding in actual fact, and its artifice. At one level Winner expresses her annoyance that her bosses have Fox Information taking part in regularly within the workplace (“Uh, simply no less than, for God’s sake, put Al Jazeera on, or a slideshow with folks’s pets.”) However Satter’s good, self-aware framing ensures her movie can’t be accused of Fox-like distortions and manipulations, by reminding us that every thing we watch, even probably the most rigorous reportage, is constructed and formed into narratives by folks with some agenda or different.
One of many strangest quirks of this entire saga, and its subsequent remolding by Satter right into a chillingly instructive lesson within the unstoppable mechanics of state energy, is that it was revealed in the midst of the trial that Winner was by no means learn her Miranda rights. She was by no means knowledgeable of her proper to silence, by no means suggested of her proper to a lawyer. And he or she was by no means formally cautioned that “something you say can and will probably be used in opposition to you in a court docket of legislation.” Whether or not you contemplate her breach of safety traitorous or patriotic, it will be laborious to observe “Actuality” and never really feel some sympathy for Winner, who wasn’t in search of fame or self-promotion, however following the dictates of her conscience. Satter’s taut, stunning “Actuality” gained’t change your thoughts on whistleblower ethics, however no less than on a human stage, it proves that typically what you say can be utilized for you too.
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