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Reality
★★★★
(M) 82 minutes
Reality is a bizarre blend of the gripping and the banal – a film in which politeness is used as a weapon and guile is disguised as embarrassment.
Sydney Sweeney proves why her career is on the rise in Reality.Credit: HBO Max via AP
Its title has two meanings. It refers to its main character, Reality Winner, a National Security Agency whistleblower whose strange first name was chosen by her father for reasons that she doesn’t seem to understand. And “reality” also describes writer-director Tina Satter’s pared-down approach to the true story of Winner’s arrest, which took place in Augusta, Georgia, on a sleepy Saturday afternoon in 2017.
She was charged with leaking a classified document to the media, and Satter scrupulously resists any urge to dramatise the case. The film’s dialogue is drawn entirely from FBI transcripts of Winner’s interrogation by two agents whose demeanour is so low-key that you could be excused for imagining that they have appointed themselves her honorary uncles.
There is a lot of solicitous talk as to whether she’s hungry or thirsty, and much time is spent discussing the care of her cat and dog if they end up having to take her into FBI headquarters.
Reality (Sydney Sweeney) has been out buying groceries when the agents stop by, and after bumbling about a bit, they come inside with her and settle on a quiet place to talk.
Josh Hamilton, Sydney Sweeney and Marchant Davis in a scene from Reality.Credit: HBO Max via AP
The older one, Special Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton), sounds almost apologetic when he tells her that they have a warrant to search the house, and his partner, Special Agent Taylor (Marchant Davis), hovers, looking anxious, but as they talk, more agents arrive and the house is fenced off with crime scene tape.
Satter became acquainted with Winner’s case when she found the FBI transcript linked to a news story. Intrigued, she used the transcript to craft a play that was staged off Broadway in 2019. The film is an adaptation, augmented by Nathan Micay’s ominously hollow-sounding score.
Matched with extraordinarily telling close-ups of Sweeney, it does a convincing job of making you feel as if you’ve slipped inside Reality’s head. She’s slow to reveal her response to the fact that her life is about to be upturned, but once the realisation takes hold, her efforts to remain cool are undermined by the panic in her eyes. Large, pale and luminous, they take on a life of their own, independent of her matter-of-fact tone.
The tension builds in this cat-and-mouse film that takes on the true story of an NSA whistleblower.Credit: HBO Max via AP
It’s a performance that makes it clear as to why Sweeney’s career is on the rise. She has the knack of being able to transform herself. Reality is the antithesis of the self-centred Zoomer that Sweeney played in the first season of White Lotus.
While she looks too young and inexperienced to have mastered the Middle Eastern languages Reality used as a cryptologist with US air force intelligence, it soon becomes clear that she’s fully aware of the calculations going on behind her interrogators’ show of benevolent concern. Like them, she’s using the awkward pauses, non-sequiturs and double-takes dictating the pace of their conversation to play for time.
Satter is alert to the incidental moments of mordant humour which grow out of this weirdly well-mannered cat-and-mouse game. She also has an eye for metaphor.
The room in which the interview takes place is completely bare of furniture because Reality never uses it, and at first, this setting seems faintly comical. Then gradually, its blandness becomes oppressive, prefiguring the prison cell which is waiting to receive her once the questions end.
The film’s pertinence is intensified by Donald Trump’s indictment for mishandling boxes of classified documents.Credit: HBO Max via AP
The document she’s accused of leaking was an NSA intelligence report containing evidence of Russian hackers’ interference in the 2016 US presidential election. To give context, Reality’s interrogation is punctuated by flashbacks to the election run-off, showing her in the military contractor’s office, where she’s working as a translator. Above her desk is a television screen permanently tuned to Fox News whose commentators are repeatedly ridiculing every suggestion that the hacks took place. It’s all we need to know about her motive for doing what she did.
The film’s pertinence is intensified by Donald Trump’s indictment for mishandling boxes of classified documents – found decorating a bedroom, bathroom and ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Reality’s exposure of just one document brought her a sentence of five years and three months – the most severe ever given to a military whistleblower after a comparable conviction. I’m betting that Trump faces no such threat.
Reality is in cinemas from June 29.
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