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.

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For an earlier report by Rod Bishop following the film's screening at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival click here

Sydney Film Festival, The Current Cinema and Streaming on various platforms - Rod Bishop recommends REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

Already acclaimed at film festivals, including Berlin, Sydney and New Zealand, this always fascinating low-key drama is having a theatrical release around Australia and is available on a variety of streaming platforms.

It opens one Saturday in June 2017, when Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) pulls into the driveway of her house in Augusta, Georgia after visiting a local supermarket. She is suddenly startled by a very loud knock on her driver’s window. 

FBI agent Justin C. Garrick (Josh Hamilton) is knocking, and from this moment on, all of the dialogue in the 82-minute Reality comes from an actual word-for-word transcription of Winner’s FBI interrogation on that day. 

She is accused of releasing a classified intelligence document to The Intercept, a New York whistleblower publication.

Agent Garrick’s summoning knock turns out to be an out-of-character moment as he, and fellow Agent R. Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), start to treat Winner with kid gloves. They worry about her cat and dog; about whether she’s thirsty; about the perishables in her grocery shopping; and about the sparse furniture in her down-at-heel house. Agents swarm around them seemingly photographing everything, pouring through books and documents and bagging her computer and mobile phone.

Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis, Reality

Winner, Garrick and Taylor move into a spare room at the back of the house where there is no furniture and they are forced to stand through the entire interrogation.

The FBI transcript makes it clear the agents believe Winner when she says “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything” and they act as though they couldn’t be more sympathetic to her plight. It’s just their momentary hard stares every time she lies that gives away their professional acumen.

Reality Winner, after all, has runs on the board, although only some of this is revealed in the transcript. She’s an Air Force veteran with the 94^th Intelligence Squadron; she has top level security clearance; she speaks Farsi, Pashto and Dari; she was based in Maryland translating intercepted conversations during the Afghan war; and she has received the Airforce Commendation Medal for “aiding in 650 enemy captures, 600 enemy killed in action and identifying 900 high value targets”.

Hoping to be deployed to Afghanistan, Winner was working for the NSA (National Security Agency) translating Farsi documents on Iran’s aerospace program when she went outside her brief, downloading and printing a classified document about Russian hacking of voter registration rolls in the 2016 Presidential election. Her pantyhose proved handy for smuggling it past security.

Apart from the Russian hacking of the rolls, the FBI was also concerned with the intelligence “sources and methods” disclosed in the document and Winner was given more than five years in jail under the Espionage Act, the longest sentence ever handed down by a US federal court for someone disclosing government information to the media without permission.

It’s extraordinary – or maybe just plain lucky - that all the essential elements of the Reality Winner affair were contained in the audio recordings made that day by the FBI. 

It gives the film a pared-down, rigid framework and director Tina Satter in her first feature draws some impressively reserved and nuanced performances from the three leads: Sweeney, Hamilton and Davis. Satter had already staged her successful play In This Room about the Winner affair and this undoubtedly assisted her clear-eyed and gripping direction in Reality.