Director: Susanna Fogel
Writer: Kerry Howley
Stars: Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, Zach Galifianakis
Synopsis: Winner is a brilliant young misfit from Texas who finds her morals challenged while serving in the U.S. Air Force and working as an NSA contractor.
“Based on reality”
There is one clear winner in Susanna Fogel’s unsteady biopic of whistleblower Reality Winner, and that is Emilia Jones. Without Jones’ commitment to, at the very least, physically embodying the contradictory woman at the film’s center, there is little chance the tonally bizarre Winner could work at all.
Winner is the kind of biographical film where “truthiness” (to quote Stephen Colbert) is employed for entertainment and narrative reasoning. The script, written by journalist Kerry Howley based on her interviews with Reality Winner and turned into the article ‘Who is Reality Winner,’ can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy, a drama, a character study, or a critique of the political milieu which saw Winner heavily punished under the espionage act. Think Adam McKay indulging in his “Have you noticed what a mess America is?” satires over the tense and more illuminating Reality by Tina Satter.
Fogler employs a near constant voice over by Jones which is often unnecessary and downright cringeworthy at times. The voice over begins the film with a kind of “So, you might be wondering how I got here,” device where Reality defines the moment as a nine-year-old when she became a ‘person of interest’ to the government. It wasn’t the moment after hearing from her father Ron (Zach Galifianakis) about puppy farming at a pet store when she released all the puppies on her sister Brittany’s birthday. It was a few days after that, on 9/11, when she watched with her family as the Twin Towers fell. Later, she asked her dad why people didn’t speak with the hijackers. “If we could communicate better, we wouldn’t have as many wars.” Reality decided to learn Arabic.
Flash forward to Reality as a senior in a Texan high school. She’s rebel coded with her pink dyed hair and Amnesty International t-shirts. An Air Force recruiter presents at her school and Reality corrects him in Pashto about some patriotic “fact” he presents. She piques his interest, and he tries to get her to enlist. It’s a no go as Reality wants to study at Texas A&M with an aim to go into humanitarian aid. Her sister, Brittany (Kathryn Newton), is already in college. Her mom, Billie (Connie Britton), is a social welfare worker and the sole income for the family. Ron has a surfeit of degrees but hasn’t had a job. He’s also popping painkillers on a regular basis. He’s still Reality’s hero and political guide. When he finds out she has decided to enlist because she was contacted by a woman claiming that she will do mostly interpretation for humanitarian reasons, he is disappointed but trusts she will do the right thing.
The film doesn’t spend a lot of time with Reality in basic training – it shows her learning Farsi and Dari and not being selected after her training to go overseas as a translator but rather as a cryptolinguist monitoring communications for terrorist activity. In Maryland’s Fort Meade, Reality proves to be one of the more skilled translators. More than her friend Kaylee (Shannon Berry), with whom she bonds as there aren’t that many other women around. When she’s not picking up terrorist activity leading to remote drone strikes, she’s exercising to excess in her CrossFit gym, volunteering, and donating to various charities. Reality is being worn down by the deaths she feels she’s complicit in and begins making mental deals with herself; if she can run a certain number of miles in a specific time then what she did saved more lives than it took. If she can do a punishing number of sit ups, they were all bad people.
Feeling isolated and missing home, she goes to a bar where she meets Andre (Danny Ramirez) who works there part time to make enough money to get into veterinarian school. He knows her from the gym, and they strike up a conversation which leads to Reality perhaps spilling more secrets than she should about her work. They have a good-natured flirtation, but Reality tells him she doesn’t date. Eventually, after spending time together, including dognapping a neglected animal freezing in the Maryland winter, they begin a live-in relationship. Life isn’t perfect for Reality, but it’s more normal than she’s accustomed to. When her tenure with the Airforce is finally over, she can either follow Andre to another state while he attends college or do what she always wanted – become a part of a volunteer program for people living in poverty. She chooses to follow her own path.
Back in Texas, life has changed significantly for the rest of the Winner family. Brittany marries the very conservative Taylor (Sam Duke) who has disapproved of Reality from their first meeting. Ron’s drinking and painkiller addiction has gotten out of hand and Billie is filing for divorce. Ron is defeated, knowing he will probably never write his philosophical book – but his legacy is Reality. Reality is furious with her mother and Brittany for turning their backs on him.
The program she thought she was hired for, Friends Across the World NGO, turns her down because she doesn’t have a college education – and despite all her years of community volunteering, her time in the army doesn’t count as formal education. Reality muses in voice over that “The United States makes it hard to help people. It makes it easier to hurt people,” linking how billion-dollar corporations pass down money to doctors to prescribe their painkillers but no-one does anything for the people who become addicted to them – leading to Ron and his failing health and increasing lack of coherence.
Ron has a heart condition and no health insurance, and Reality does the one thing she didn’t think she’d do. She becomes an NSA contractor to pay for his care. This is where, bombarded by Fox News on the office television, Reality finds evidence of Russian interreference in the election (via hacking voting machines) which claimed Trump the President. She decides that it is in the best interest of the people that they know. A belief which is cemented when her father after suffering congestive heart failure tells her in the hospital that despite her working for the NSA, “You’re still you, you can still do some damage. You’ve always known what your hills are.” That hill is printing out the documents, getting them past security in her pantyhose, and sending them to The Interceptor.
The film then goes through the FBI turning up at her home, the bail application, her remand to custody where she is subjected to “Diesel Therapy” and put in solitary, the trial and the sentencing. She receives the longest sentence in U.S. history for leaking documents. “What can I say? I like to win,” the narration quips.
Considering the seriousness of the subject matter – especially once Reality is caught for what she did and the near torture she endured in the lead up to her trial – Winner is confounding in its insistence on using so much sarcastic comedy and droll dialogue. Fogel suggests that Reality has a form of OCD (there is a book in her luggage about it, and the constant mental bargaining) but she doesn’t follow through on it. There are hints of Reality’s bulimia, but she vomits during times of extreme stress, not habitually. The target on Reality’s back is made clear during the trial and Billie’s subsequent fight for her daughter, but there is always a wisecrack somewhere that Kerry Howley inserts that doesn’t land. Reality comes off as painfully naïve under all the righteous bravado.
As to the “truthiness” of the film – so much of it is made up that “Based on reality” with either and uppercase or lower-case R is apt. Andre didn’t exist. Ron and Billie divorced when Reality was eight. Reality travelling overseas was never brought up. The fact that her stepfather raised her is wiped completely from the work. The deathbed speech didn’t happen. Reality Winner is more libertarian than bleeding heart lefty, but that’s also something Fogel’s film avoids. There was no need to fabricate large parts of the film as what actually occurred is fascinating on its own terms.
Emilia Jones and Zach Galifianakis are excellent, especially in their scenes together and keep the film from tumbling into blather. Emilia Jones particularly shines even when she’s given slight material. Connie Britton is a strong as Reality’s stoic mother, and Kathryn Newton is good in a cast-against-type role as Brittany. Danny Ramirez, too, is solid as the charming and supportive Andre.
Reality spends a lot of time talking about her name and how it’s the only thing people will really remember her for. The news story was eventually published by The Interceptor but, by the time it was, America was already in complete distraction mode. Susanna Fogel’s film isn’t going to do a great deal to bring Reality Winner back into the public consciousness because the Reality Winner of the film is an oblique character; there are too many versions of Reality, and they don’t gel. “Where would I be if I didn’t think so much? If I wasn’t such a pain in the ass? If I didn’t have to say something?” the voiceover asks at the end. It’s a hard question to answer.
Winner has some excellent scenes and sections but forced humor undermines the gut-punch sections. One suspects Susanna Fogel doesn’t want the audience to ask, “Was Reality always unhinged, or was she worn down by trauma from dealing with the Military Industrial Complex?” She certainly doesn’t want the audience to question her bravery in taking the classified documents – but Winner (not by design) does murky the waters.
People wondered how a Pokémon loving, yoga practicing, gun toting, vegetarian, CrossFit obsessed young veteran became a whistleblower and object warning to the American people. After Winner they’ll still be wondering. Winner struggles with the serio-comic tone chosen by Susanna Fogel and Reality Winner doesn’t feel real.
