“Why?” is the simple, yet fascinating question at the heart of Tina Satter’s debut feature Reality. Moving her critically acclaimed Off Broadway play to the big screen, the filmmaker unspools a rigorous, yet surprisingly affecting reconstruction of Reality Winner’s arrest for leaking documents to The Intercept that brought Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election to light. The adaptation — a verbatim dramatization of the FBI interrogation transcript, including every cough and pause, with no extra words added — is nonetheless gripping and unpredictable, precisely because Winner’s reasons for torpedoing her career and winding up in jail are simultaneously easy to understand and hard to fathom.
At first glance, Reality (Sydney Sweeney) seems the unlikeliest candidate for espionage. The multilinguist — a rare specialist in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto — is a contract worker for the NSA, owns a rescue dog, teaches yoga, and dreams of active deployment to the field to better serve her country. Her shrugged shoulders and near indifference to the FBI showing up at her door is almost convincing enough until the cracks start to appear in her feigned innocence under questioning by Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis). She flinches ever so slightly when they ask about her pink AR-15 (“How’d you know?”) only for her own dwindling defences to crumble when she offhandedly mentions a key detail about the leaked report: it had been folded. Yet, through all of it, Garrick and Taylor can’t quite believe she’s caught up in the biggest exposure of U.S. intelligence since CitizenFour. Frankly, neither can Reality, who convincingly states, “I wasn’t trying to be Snowden.”
Unspooling over 85 taut minutes, Satter’s seemingly straightforward approach is actually a narrative prism. As a procedural, “Reality” is almost a casebook study of how agents ingratiate themselves toward suspects and eventually break them down. Garrick, in a fatherly manner, leads the questioning, working with Davis to strategically loop the conversation back and forth between harmless personal matters and criminal queries in an effort to trick and trap Reality. The film is also impressively verité, the camera in constant, unflinching proximity capturing every nuance of the interrogation as the agents methodically uncover the facts that Reality tries so hard to hide. Foremost, however, the picture is a drama, driven by the remarkable dance between its core trio led Sweeney’s powerfully poignant, subtle performance as Reality, who strives so hard to hide how far out of her depth she is until she can’t hold on any longer. Guided by remarkable staging and blocking by Satter (clearly well practiced from the Off Broadway production) the way Garrick and Taylor impose their bodes around Reality, but never threaten, is fascinating. Their words are inviting and reasonable but their physical presence sends an undeniably different, more menacing message. And Satter occasionally breaks from her docudrama aesthetic entirely, slipping in the thrum of Nathan Micay’s minimal score, or visual flourishes to substitute when the dialogue runs into redacted portions of the transcript.
In that sense, “Reality” is more than an adaptation — it’s an interpretation as Satter’s unassumingly artful methodology offers a layered investigation into an afternoon whose actual unfolding is only truly known by those that were there. But it’s in the film’s sly multiplicity that the raw truth of June 3, 2017 feels revealed, even if some answers remain out of grasp. As the cuffs are gently placed around Reality’s wrists, and we learn the outcome of her attempt to protect U.S. democracy was receiving the longest sentence in history for the release of unauthorized information, we’re left with two unanswerable questions: Why would anybody take that risk? Why isn’t everybody taking that risk?
Director: Tina Satter
Screenplay: Tina Satter, James Paul Dallas
Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, Marchánt Davis
Producers: Noah Stahl, Brad Becker-Parton, Riva Marker, Greg Nobile
Cinematography: Paul Yee
Production design: Tommy Love
Costume design: Enver Chakartash
Editing: Jennifer Vecchiarello, Ron Dulin
Music: Nathan Micay
Sound: Ryan Billia
Production companies: Seaview, 2 SQ FT (United States)
World sales: MK2
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In English
85 minutes
