Edward Snowden and the Justice League: A review of Citizenfour
We’re living in strange times, and we have the films to prove it. Today’s exhibit: Citizenfour, a movie about…well, I don’t know what. I’m baffled.
Citizenfour seems to present itself as a documentary that’s been awkwardly welded to a political thriller “starring” Edward Snowden as himself—a pale, nerdy political martyr urging film director and journalist Laura Poitras to spare others by “nailing me to the cross” and revealing to the public his leaked documentation of the NSA massive domestic and international surveillance programs. It co-stars Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill as, respectively, the obnoxious career-obsessed newshound who manipulates the naïve Snowden for his own purposes, and the old mensch journalist who tries to inject a note of common sense into the bizarre proceedings. The female lead is played by Poitras herself, a shadowy narrator figure behind the camera who shares an intense communion with Snowden and whose point of view defines Snowden for us. In a supporting role, William Binney, by far the most likable character, plays the tough old codger who’s already paid a heavy price for being an NSA whistleblower and is refreshingly practical and unself-pitying.
But it ends up turning into a ponderous thriller indeed, mostly filmed in a hotel room in Hong Kong, where Poitras was holed up with Snowden for eight days. There she records extended interviews in which he tells her, Greenwald, and MacAskill his story, discusses the journalists’ rollout of his NSA documents, frets, stares out the window, and awaits discovery.
It’s a strange interlude in that hotel room. It’s speciously informative as we hear Snowden tell the journalists who he is and, broadly, what he’s handing over to them, as well as conveying his own sense of himself as a man with a mission, sacrificing himself for a highly moral cause. Only the details of how Snowden went about leaking the information are new to anyone who’s been halfway paying attention, as many critics have observed. The film contains no major revelations about NSA and other government surveillance programs that haven’t already been widely reported.
But you can’t help asking a lot of awkward questions about “character motivation” while you’re stuck in that hotel room with Poitras and Snowden. For example, what possessed Snowden to allow this whole super-secret process to be filmed in the first place? Snowden is so worried about being “viewed” that he drapes a towel over his head and his laptop while typing a message, lest there be a hidden camera planted behind him in the headboard of his bed. Didn’t he worry about being “viewed” as the hero of a film?
And despite all the time we spend in that hotel room, watching Snowden, we never find out what triggered the key plot-turn of this thriller: Snowden’s decision to flee, rather than offer himself up to the authorities after he’s handed over the documents to Greenwald and Poitras, as originally planned. Did Greenwald persuade him to take a new course of action, at some point that remains off-screen? We certainly see Greenwald urge Snowden not to “do their work for them” by identifying himself to as the leaker and surrendering. But Snowden seems set on his “locked plan.” Greenwald then agrees with Snowden that, by surrendering, Snowden would send the message that “I’m not hiding for one second!”
No one in the room seems to see the humor of that message, coming from a man who’s sequestered himself in a hotel room for days, and who turns ashen and round-eyed at the sound of a hotel fire alarm test which might be a ruse designed to force him out of hiding.
http://pando.com/2014/11/02/edward-snowden-and-the-justice-league-a-review-of-citizenfour/
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