Reality
“I knew it was secret. But I also knew I had pledged my service to the American people.” Reality Winner
Almost everything about Reality Winner’s name is too perfect for what happened. A former Air Force linguist contracted with the NSA, fluent in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, with top security clearance and a whistleblower on June 3, 2017 she was arrested for printing out classified information about Russian interference in the 2016 election and sending it to The Intercept. She did not “win” her battle against the federal government despite support from Julian Assange; denied bail multiple times, Winner was sentenced to five years in prison, the longest ever given for leaking classified documents. (She was released early this year.)
What struck me most about Reality wasn’t just her youth (she was only 25), but her blonde blue eyed fresh faced innocence. she looked like a Cross Fit devotee. Her Instagram was filled with posts documenting her healthy meals and weight-lifting videos; it felt impossible to marry these two images together. Both FBI agents who questioned her had recording devices attached to their wrists. They recorded the entire interrogation.
In 2019 Tina Satter turned that transcript into a play called Is This A Room that made its debut at New York’s Vineyard Theatre before moving to Broadway last month; the script is entirely taken from the transcript word for word. “Reality,” Satter’s film adaptation of that stage play, is an impressive and deeply disturbing piece of work it’s also her directorial debut.
Sydney Sweeney plays Reality, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis play the two FBI agents whose job it is to figure out what she did when she did it “if” she did it isn’t really a question. Winner is confronted by these agents outside of her home in Augusta as she gets out of her car after coming back from grocery shopping; they do the entire questioning process first on the lawn outside her house and then inside in an unfurnished back area that as Winner apologizes for on the tape is dirty, and isn’t really a room at all. She consents to the questioning. She doesn’t ask for a lawyer.
This transcript is interesting because it begins so casually, and Winner doesn’t seem to wonder at all why FBI agents are confronting her on her front lawn. Wouldn’t an innocent person demand to know what they think she’s done? Reality complies. She doesn’t act surprised that they’re there, though she says she doesn’t know why they want to talk to her. The only thing that shakes her is the thought of her pets. If the agents could please close the front door as they search her house so the cat doesn’t get out, that would be great! Could someone please call so and so to come pick up my dog if I’m arrested? (If you are a pet owner, this will make perfect sense.)
“Reality” could be called bare bones, it certainly takes place in one room for most of its running time, with three people talking. There are some interesting camera angles as the questioning gets more intense, but Satter generally lets the language do its work. There are a couple of “flashbacks,” but they’re brief: Reality is shown at her desk at work, with Fox News playing on all the TV screens. No attempt is made to “open up” or otherwise dramatize the story.
At first, benign good cop smiles from the FBI agents. They just want to clear up some confusion; they have a couple questions! They’re dressed casually khakis and Izods and they make small talk. Really small talk. The weather, her groceries, her pets, she mentions lifting weights and getting ready for a competition; some of this even feels like casual banter. Reality’s concern for the well-being of her pets is not brushed off, while trying to assuage them, though, alarmed moves are made by agents when she tries to walk toward either dog or front door, these things their control of where she goes she notices. But she remains cooperative. She is never hostile.
There are places where Satter cuts to a blank screen, with the words being said by Reality and the agents unfurling out in transcript form it underlines the word for word nature of the script, which contains false starts and “uh”s and “um”s and bland language and everything else people really use when they talk. Nobody here is eloquent. It’s fascinating to listen to because this is how people talk, and it’s as close as possible to how it actually went down
The redactions in the transcript are personalized and visualized in almost supernatural flashes, glitches in the Matrix, adding to the eerie feeling of a gigantic monolithic government crouched in the corner of that bare dirty room in a small house in Georgia. Everything seems real, but the tension pushes it into an almost surreal and experimental space. (Satter runs with this in a hallucinatory section where the all-male FBI team laughs at Reality’s expense.)
Though she may seem like an unexpected choice for this casting decision given her roles on shows such as “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus,” Satter understands what she’s doing and so does Sweeney. The actress plays Reality with simplicity and without affectation; she doesn’t act innocent or suggest any kind of insider knowledge about herself. She doesn’t have outbursts or give impassioned political speeches. She holds herself together until and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here she doesn’t anymore, but it happens organically rather than dramatically. Reality did what she did for a reason; she knows what’s coming next, expects to be punished for it and is ready to take her medicine.
In a brutally fluorescent lit room that has no clever tricks or soundtrack or even any atmosphere to hide behind, Sweeney gives an extraordinarily modulated performance that builds perfectly.
“I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” Reality tells them.
But “Nothing About This Is Normal” does remind us how many secrets have come out since 2017 partly because they had been locked away in places like The Intercept’s filing cabinet and how much danger people put themselves through when they become whistleblowers against administrations who identify more closely with their own ideas about justice than they do with those enshrined in law.
“Reality” is not long enough to make you forget other movies too heavy with meaning that seemed important at the time; it is a movie with an arc so strong that it could have been released 40 years ago as an important film about the war, for example, or today as a critical piece of historical fiction about something like Watergate. Satter doesn’t need to push anything in this story because everything has already been put out there all she needs to do is turn on the lights, and let people look around.
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.