Oversharing
Vertigo Releasing
MOVIE REVIEW
Reality (2023)
They say “the truth hurts, so write fiction” but rarely are we meant to take an axiom so literally. Nowadays the dust barely settles on a real-life event before a dramatization of it is made (for some reason Mark Wahlberg specializes in this, though Viggo Mortensen isn’t above it either). In the last decade verbatim theater, in which actors use transcripts of genuine real-life words to act out the thoughts and feelings of the characters, has become commonplace. But this happens less in film, though things are changing there too, with “Reality” at the head of the pack. Director Tina Satter has adapted her own play, “Is This a Room,” with cowriter James Paul Dallas for the script of “Reality.” I say script; the text is based on the two-hour-ish recording made by the F.B.I. on June 3, 2017, when it arrested Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) on suspicion of espionage. It has been condensed but a disclaimer at the start promises authenticity. And there are enough strange little asides and people stumbling over their words in the ways people talk in real life but written dialogue rarely captures. This adds an air of wait-for-it to the proceedings, but for dramatic strength it leaves much to be desired.
Ms. Sweeney does wonders as Reality, a young woman living alone in Augusta, Ga., and doing top-secret work, translating documents about Iranian aerospace into English. However she prefers Pashto and has been attempting to use her top-level security clearance to be sent to Afghanistan. In the meantime she lifts weights, does CrossFit and teaches yoga classes. Coming home from the grocery store one afternoon, she is approached by two men with badges, Justin (Josh Hamilton) and Wally (Marchánt Davis). They have a warrant – which they do not show her right away – and while they are waiting for their colleagues to show up to search her house repeat how they would like to speak with her voluntarily. This small woman faced with a sudden onslaught of large men in polo shirts on her yard acquiesces to everything. She ends up with the agents in an empty room at the back of her house, a space she finds creepy and therefore doesn’t use. And there, a slow and strange conversation begins.
Why didn’t she demand a lawyer and otherwise keep her mouth shut? The fact that Reality agreed to talk at all implies she knows why they are there; and this is where the actual transcript is not as useful as a dramatization would be. There could be less focus on whether or not the cat is on a leash and who has a sinus infection to instead build the slow realization that this young woman actually did what the agents think she did. But the use of real photos of Ms. Winner (including screenshots of her Instagram) destroys our ability to accept Ms. Sweeney’s very good performance, highly reliant on facial expression and body language, as the genuine article. That kind of line-blurring can work on a stage, where belief has already been suspended, but it’s much tougher to do in a movie, perhaps because of the distance between the image and the watcher that doesn’t exist when the performers and the audience are in the same room.
That said, when the dialogue from the actual transcripts was redacted, Ms. Satter has the actor saying the lines glitch out, a neat verbal trick. Nathan Micay’s superb music does a remarkable job of building off-kilter mood, of displaying Reality’s frame of mind as the chickens come home to roost. And Paul Yee’s cinematography does as much as can be done in the bare space to create a sense of dread and unease in the mostly empty room. But by choosing to focus the story in this way, Ms. Satter repeated the mistakes made by the news media when the story broke, and focused on the whistleblower instead of the crimes the whistleblower revealed. Surely the attention ought to be on the crime, and not on the person who pointed out the cover-up? But is that the world we live in now, where punishment is for the person who points out the emperor’s new clothes, while the emperor waltzes away scot-free? Since it would seem to be, this movie, which challenges that injustice simply by existing, is a very good one. But if it had thought more about its own point and allowed itself some freedom with the precise language used, it would have done much better at telling its truth.
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