Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison stumbles across REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

 

Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, Reality

Reality is very much a movie of the moment. It features rising star Sydney Sweeney (of the Jeans Commercial furore) and puts her up as a Trump era whistle blower. 

The twenty five year old real life subject, who is genuinely named Reality Winner, was ex-military,  working as N.S.A. translator because of her Farsi and Pashto language skills (we never do find out about that) while waiting for her military deployment. 

We watch as FBI agents arrive on her suburban tract home lawn, producing a search warrant.  The exchange is subtly unnatural,  with her taking it all calmly and their questioning casual. Agent Marchánt Davis jokes about having  three guns in the house being like his own home. They load her groceries into the fridge and help round up her pets but they are quick to keep her from handling her cell phone and make a point of calling in someone so she is never alone with one of them. It builds menace.

The team get down to work in the empty back room - “if you want to sit on the floor.”  The spectre of Edward Snowden hovers. Josh Hamilton’s agent re-assures “I don’t think you’re a big bad master spy.” Gradually incriminating detail is worked into the exchanges (the leaked document was folded once) while she denies the suggestion that she took documents off her business premises - classified information which may be of value to the enemy.

The film works up interest as an exact transcription of the interrogation recordings. I hate to think of the billable hours studio legal put in on checking. It comes complete with action to match noises-off and jump cuts and pixel splash to account for redacted material or switch offs. First feature writer-director Tina Satter had already staged this as a theatre piece. The minimalist form is opened out by glimpses of the Augusta Georgia neighbourhood where Sweeny/Reality Winter waits for her proposed active service - electric wiring poles, fenced yards, bare streets whose residents probably drive there from their day jobs. The final pull back from the red tile roofs is a resonant comment. This calm gets to be disrupted by jagged news clip montages that flash the James Comey dismissal, Fox News, Bill Maher.  We sense world events funnelling down into this unremarkable location.

The film’s laid-back approach doesn’t hide where their sympathies lie and,  with minimal help from makeup and costuming, Sweeney is faced with the most demanding role of her beginner career. She aces the vulnerable, conflicted, winning, and finally justified (Senate Hearing) character. Equalling this one will now be her challenge.

The film certainly deserves more than being buried in the SBS schedule. Though I spend more time than I like breaking that down each week, I only chanced on Reality because it came on after Adam Elliot’s endearing Mary & Max. Close call.