The first line of “Winner” says it all: “My name is Reality Winner.” This uninspired introduction to the character, an NSA employee who leaked classified documents surrounding Russian election interference to the media, sets the tone for what’s to follow. Susanna Fogel’s film is not actively bad, just aggressively bland.
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This ripped-from-the-headlines tale has no shortage of compelling material from which to pull, even beyond just the subject’s wild name. As the strictly chronological timeline of Kerry Howley’s script describes her, she’s a straight-talking, no-BS Texas girl who fights passionately for what she loves. That starts from a young age being animal welfare but slowly burgeons into a more expansive and aggressive defense of personal freedoms.
She’s a character built for the cinema, which makes it so frustrating that star Emilia Jones does not play her as much beyond a garden-variety “quirky” girl. It does not help matters that she’s asked to sprinkle these oddities on top of the character as she exists on the page when those features should be baked in. Reality Winner cries out for a livelier form to match her eccentricities, but the film feels uninterested in resembling its box-defying subject. Fogel’s direction makes “Winner” little more than a spirited run-through of its protagonist’s Wikipedia page.
If anything could pull off the winking self-awareness of Adam McKay’s post-“The Big Short” house style, it’d be this. But instead, it hews to every convention in the book. It’s as if Fogel designed the film for consumption as background noise for users scrolling on a second screen. “Winner” asks nothing of its audience as it feeds them life events and the occasional bit of introspective character narration off a steady conveyor belt.
Fogel and Howley also take the bizarre tactic of insulting the audience they want to inform by having Reality offer constant reminders of how forgettable people found her story as it unfolded in the news. They hide behind the character’s name to make the point that Americans refused to engage with the truths she unveiled to the same extent as, say, Edward Snowden. But “Winner” itself is guilty of the very sin it decries, flattening its protagonist into an easily palatable parable instead of grappling with her messiness.
Prior to “Winner,” there was already one major work about Reality Winner: 2023’s Sydney Sweeney-starring “Reality.” That film used the transcript of her apprehension as the script for a cinematic equivalent of verbatim theater. After this, there could probably be a third based on all the threads that Fogel’s film chooses not to pursue.
It’s not interested in her neurodivergence. It’s not interested in critiquing the surveillance state. It’s not interested in exploring unconventional expressions of patriotism. It’s not interested in nuanced media critique. It’s not interested in unpacking systemic injustices baked into the prison-industrial complex.
For a film about a political prisoner, “Winner” hardly feels political at all, lest it run the risk of offending a casual viewer. Reality Winner’s mix-and-match politics provide a natural opportunity to open discussion across the aisle because she does not sort neatly into a single ideology. The film is content to just water down the story to little more than “misfit winds up at NSA, stays true to her ideals by leaking classified documents” to avoid offending anyone.
There are long stretches when it seems to forget where it’s all heading, particularly in the middle section where Reality falls in love with the bartender who wants to be a veterinarian (Danny Ramirez). Family drama with her kind-hearted mother (Connie Britton), struggling alcoholic father (Zach Galifianakis), and frequently exasperated sister (Kathryn Newton) feel similarly perfunctory, though they at least help explain the forces molding Reality’s worldview.
Showing her humanity and not just fixating on a life-defining act is not a crime. But a film about someone who took a risk big enough to land her in jail for four years should not feel as safe as “Winner” does. For something that loves decrying the mind-numbing content that goes down easily in the digital age and distracts people from the real issues, this film sure does resemble it. [C]
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