'Reality': Getting in the mindset of uneducated vanity - review

Reality tells the story of Reality Winner, a US National Security Agency translator who leaked classified documents to the press and went to prison for years. The movie, which opened throughout the country yesterday, is a dramatized version of the transcript of her initial interrogation and arrest, and it’s more entertaining than you might imagine.

Sydney Sweeney, a young star who has played in her share of rom-coms, gives a compelling performance in a tricky role, because she spends most of the movie chatting about trivial matters with the FBI investigators, such as her fitness routine, while they slowly work up to the point where they confront her with their knowledge of her crime.

Up to a certain point, she denies everything, and Sweeney is particularly good trying to figure out how much they know. It’s a tour-de-force, since from the opening moments, we know – and we know the FBI investigators know – that she is lying.

Anyone who follows the news also knows that she confessed and was imprisoned, but the suspense here – and there is suspense – comes not from what will happen, but how it will happen, how she will react.

It’s this suspense that will get you through the first 40 minutes or so, and all the monotonous chit-chat about whether her dog needs a drink and what kinds of guns – she has several – she keeps in her home. You watch because you know something real is about to break through the forced politeness.

Not rooting for Reality

AS HER STORY unravels, it seems that director Tina Satter wants us to root for Reality, a warrior for the truth, against the bad guys from the FBI, and to venerate her status as a whistleblower. But you may have a more complicated reaction. She is a strange mixture, a decorated air force veteran who, at the time of her arrest, was trying – ironically enough – to get her security clearance raised to go back into Afghanistan with US special forces.

But as she talks, she reveals that she is filled with righteous anger about various workplace grievances, such as televisions in the NSA tuned exclusively to Fox News. This seems to have led her to be outraged about what she considered the NSA’s coverup of facts about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

Like many whistleblowers – and I happen to have known another American who served in federal prison for revealing classified documents under the Espionage Act quite well, but that’s a story for another article – she is filled with an outsize self-regard. That can be invaluable when used for good in situations where something of great importance is being covered up, but in marginal or unimportant situations, this self-regard grates.

In the case of Reality (one wonders at the wisdom of giving high-security clearance to someone who didn’t change the bizarre name her parents gave her), she revealed just one piece of information to a journalist, when there were already mountains of evidence that Russian cyber warriors had done everything they could to swing the elections to Donald Trump. Anyone who wasn’t befriended by a Russian bot online in 2016 didn’t spend much time on social media.

But Reality was driven to break every vow she had taken to uphold security regulations because she was so deeply offended by what she had learned in an in-house, online publication. “I wasn’t thinking about myself at that point,” she tells the investigators, but clearly she was thinking very hard about herself and how to make a grand gesture. “It was too much to just sit back and think, ‘why do I have this job if I’m just going to be helpless?’”

At the end, the movie presents a quote from her that spotlights her megalomania: “I knew it was secret. But also I had pledged service to the American people.”

The movie and her saga remind me of a quote from V.S. Naipul’s essay, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” about Gale Benson, a woman who joined a cult of revolutionaries, one of whom murdered her: “… [E]verything that is remembered of [her] suggests the great uneducated vanity of the middle-class dropout” – words that could also describe today’s coddled pro-Hamas protesters on US college campuses.

It’s hard for most of us to get inside the heads of people like this, but Reality, and particularly Sweeney’s performance, illuminates this mind-set.