Entertaining whistleblower story offers strong performances, few insights
Whether you think she’s a traitor or a hero, you can’t argue that Reality Winner’s story is the stuff of Hollywood screenplays. Last year HBO premiered Reality, a docudrama based on a 2022 play that featured actual dialogue from FBI transcripts. Now Winner, a fictionalized, far less serious but no less entertaining take on the young woman’s story drops on streaming services. The picture may be a bit too blithe for its own good, but if you’re at all fascinated by Winner–and it’s hard not to be–you should give it a watch.
For those who may not remember, Reality Winner is the Air Force veteran and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who, in 2017, when she was just 25 years old, leaked classified information about Russian interference in the 2016 election to the online news site The Intercept. The FBI found and arrested her before the document was published, and she received the longest prison sentence ever handed down by a federal court for such a charge.
So who is Reality Winner, and what motivated her actions? Winner doesn’t have all the answers, but director Susanna Fogel (a co-writer of 2019’s fun comedy Booksmart) adopts a breezy, comic tone for her character study, loosely adapted from writer Kerry Howley’s 2017 New York magazine article about the whistleblower. The result is a film that feels more like an Adam McKay Big Short or Vice type of satire than a probing, dramatic based-on-a-true-story informant film like The Post, The Report, or Snowden. While highly entertaining, the picture doesn’t yield any profound insight into its central character.
Similar to many of McKay films, much of Winner features cheeky voice-over narration. Coda’s Emilia Jones does the honors here, and her dry, straightforward delivery as Reality easily draws us in. As portrayed by Jones, Reality is fiercely intelligent (she’s a translator of multiple languages, including Farsi and Pashto), empathetic, and driven physically and mentally.
The film tells us that Reality was heavily influenced by her equally intelligent, warm but troubled father Ron, played here by a subdued Zach Galifaniakis. He does some of his best work to date here, giving a compassionate and complicated performance as a loving father struggling with addiction. Connie Britton, as Reality’s social worker mother Billie, and Kathryn Newton as Reality’s more conventional sister Brittany, also are strong in smaller but no less important supporting roles.
But it’s Jones who carries the picture. She creates an indelible if perplexing character in Reality, a woman who starts her career wanting to help those suffering around the world, but who becomes as jaded, frustrated, and haunted by her work translating recordings of suspected terrorists as much as she remains dedicated and inspired to serve her country. Whether Reality is a patriot bent on sharing a truth she believes the public deserves, or a naive and bitter contractor acting out of hostility is for you to decide. Fogel, Howley, and especially Jones paint just enough of a portrait to let you mull that question over – and to ask yourself what you might have done in similar circumstances.
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Winner is now available via streaming, including on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.
