Impromptu whistleblower Reality Winner—a young woman with a peculiar name from a working-class Texas family who worked for the NSA and leaked classified information about Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—has already been the subject of multiple film projects. First, the 2021 documentary "Reality Winner," for which she was interviewed. And then there's last year's "Reality," a fictionalized account of her interrogation and arrest with dialogue directly extracted from the official recording. The latter, directed by Tina Satter, is a rigorous chamber piece that handles the subject matter with the gravitas it merits and often feels cinematically audacious in its tense construction. Now, with director Susanna Fogel's lukewarm biopic "Winner," the controversial figure gets the "let me tell you how I got here" treatment.
The opening shot sees Reality (played here by Emilia Jones) being taken into custody, as she explains in a cheeky voiceover that some consider her a traitor while others consider her a hero. From there, she takes us back to her childhood to understand some of the prosecution's arguments against her. The problem is that this tone severely undercuts the magnitude of Reality's actions, ostensibly to try to portray her as simplistically quirky. From those early vignettes, her father (Zach Galifianakis) emerges as a major influence in shaping her worldview–someone who fiercely questions authority and injustice.
Here, we see that the Bush administration's use of 9/11 as an excuse to bomb Iraq prompted Reality to teach herself Arabic and Pashto while in high school. Later, she joined the Air Force, intending to be deployed to Afghanistan and be a translator on the ground. That never happened, and instead, she was hired to listen in and translate conversations between presumed terrorists to justify the airstrikes during the Obama era—until the NSA came calling.
Working from a screenplay by Kerry Howley, the director, who previously worked with Jones on the atrocious short-story adaptation "Cat Person," uses a series of montages to express the guilt-driven turmoil in Reality's mind as a side effect of her work "protecting" the homeland.
To atone for her part in the deaths of numerous people (some believed to be plotting attacks and others who were innocent collateral damage), Reality volunteers her time to clean bedpans and exercises till exhaustion to avoid thinking. All of these activities seem like bargains that she strikes with her conscience, trying to convince herself she's still a moral individual. Those sequences are as deep as character development goes here. Jones, best known for the Oscar-winning "CODA," radiates a charming nonchalance, playing Winner as someone who doesn't abide by social cues regarding dating and friendships. Yet she feels miscast in the part. The turn reads as one-note, almost indistinguishable from the young women she embodied in "CODA" or even "Cat Person." Rather than the actor molding herself to the role, Jones seems to force the character to match her.
As a character study, "Winner" fails to grapple with the government's willingness to obfuscate the truth and lie to the public under the banner of upholding national security. That the real Winner was punished so harshly—she spent four years in prison—for bringing that to light should worry any American who still believes truth is in any way a priority for those in power. For all the biographical information Fogel includes here, Reality remains a two-dimensional entity. Her appearance in court, the public smearing of her character, and the shock of serving her sentence after a life of selflessness and exemplary behavior only occupy a few minutes in the last act, adding to the film's hollowness.
Near the end, a miniscule segment is dedicated to the efforts of Reality's mother, Billie Winner (a poignant Connie Britton), to speak for her daughter and denounce the U.S. government. That side of the tale hasn't yet been explored at length and could have made for a more intriguing angle. What's most noticeably missing in "Winner" is the ambivalence that someone in Reality's position likely experiences. Her genuine desire to always do the right thing led her to carry out an act she deemed patriotic. But when this results in scorn and time behind bars, the psychological impact of realizing how the system operates must have devastated her. Can she still believe in a nation that treats her like an enemy? Those thorny sentiments find no home in this trivial exploration of her life.
Destined to fade into obscurity in the presence of the other two films about Reality Winner, Fogel's version should at least indicate to other filmmakers that they must leave this story alone and move on to other preoccupations. There are plenty of those in this country.
