Allow me a thesis. Over the past two decades or so, the indestructible Oliver Stone – who is to cinema as bulls are to porcelain emporia – has been at his most interesting when giving in to Stockholm Syndrome. Both Nixon and W had their flaws (they were Oliver Stone films, after all), but the director's occasional, reluctant tolerance for his despised subjects injected real tension into the projects.
Maybe some right-wing firebrand should have had a crack at Edward Snowden. It would be unfair to call Stone's film a hagiography, but we are left in little doubt as to whose side we are on. The counter arguments are mounted half- heartedly – straw men with targets painted boldly across chests – and blazed into obliteration. The government is portrayed with all the generosity the makers of The Prisoner brought to Number Six's sinister captors.
Those whinges noted, Stone's study of the controversial whistleblower is not without its diversions. The director has cranked back on his annoying stylistic peccadilloes and allowed the actors some space to act. We get the expected childish graphical representations of the web – lines connecting across a map and then being drawn into the hero's eye – but the promiscuous media swapping that characterised Natural Born Killers seems like a distant, terrible memory.
Stone has allowed his lead, the fine Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to attack an actual impersonation of Snowden. Hopkins didn’t try that hard to sound like Nixon. But Gordon-Levitt lowers his voice to a weird rolling rumble that will ring bells with only a small portion of the audience. It helps add at least one angle to a character that remains stubbornly obscure throughout.
We begin near the end, with Snowden meeting Guardian journalists before launching his first drop of information from the National Security Agency. That newspaper is practically a character in the film. Tom Wilkinson and Zachary Quinto play, respectively, the paper's writers Ewen MacAskill and Glenn Greenwald. Alan Rusbridger, then the editor, actually plays himself. Melissa Leo is also on hand as Laura Poitras, who made the Oscar-winning Snowden documentary.
Stone thus makes it clear that he is part of a wider team devoted to disseminating Snowden’s leaks and protecting his reputation. Any further doubt as to the director’s intentions are dispelled by Rhys Ifans’s hugely entertaining, pantomime performance as the hero’s first boss in the CIA.
Is it a coincidence that, like the most malign figure in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he is named "O'Brien"? (Actually "O'Brian", but never mind.) At any rate, when he finally gets to confront the converted Snowden, he looms enormously on a screen that even Big Brother would find ostentatious.
Snowden does go on a journey. But it’s more three stops on the Tube than a balloon flight around the world. He begins as a middle- stump Conservative, before, under the guidance of girlfriend Shailene Woodley, drifting towards something like radicalism. “What about the liberal media?” he asks pathetically when his squeeze raises concerns about George W Bush’s wars. Before long he’s decided that the only thing government surveillance protects is “supremacy of the government”.
Fair enough. We know where Stone stands on these matters. The good news is that, exploiting fluid camerawork by Anthony Dod Mantle and an insistent score by Craig Armstrong, Stone delivers his least lumpy film in close to a decade. Explaining the IT details with great lucidity, Snowden clatters along at a very satisfying pace as it carves out a pleasing traditional narrative.
Heck, it even ends like a sports movie. “He did it. The kid did it,” CIA subversive Nic Cage shouts at the TV when the news eventually emerges. Look elsewhere for subtlety.
