The sweetness of historical vindication pervades “Winner,” Susanna Fogel’s bio-pic about Reality Winner, who, in 2018, pleaded guilty to retaining and transmitting national-defense information to the media, while employed by a military contractor working for the N.S.A. Fogel, working with a script by the journalist Kerry Howley, follows Winner from the age of nine to the aftermath of her plea, and organizes the movie around voice-over reminiscences by Reality (the character is played by Emilia Jones). The protagonist’s tone is surprisingly breezy, even when narrating events, maintaining an air of self-deprecating and self-aware distance as she tells her story, even at its grimmest. But there is irony in Reality’s casual, conversational address to the audience, because the movie as a whole conveys a passionate and detailed sense of her view of American political rot. “I just thought you should know that your government was lying to you, so I tried to tell you,” she says at the beginning of the film, explaining the deed that got her into trouble, over slow-motion footage of her arrest. “Yeah, they don’t like when you do that.”
This was in 2017, and she believed that the public was being misled about the role of Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. In her eventual plea, Winner admitted to having mailed the Intercept a classified document that detailed how the Russian military, days before the election, had conducted online attacks in an attempt to penetrate U.S. voting systems—and, in at least one case, succeeded. The movie delivers a critical and analytical unfolding of the circumstances of Reality’s life, starting with her childhood in Texas, in order to reveal her sense of deceptions and injustices that pass largely unchallenged in everyday American life. Her mentor in seeing the story beneath the surface of things is her scholarly father, Ron (Zach Galifianakis), whose enforced idleness in the wake of a car accident and subsequent abuse of painkillers seem to have fostered an outsider’s skepticism about the ways and means of business as usual. He tells the nine-year-old Reality (played by Annelise Pollmann) about the cruelty of so-called puppy mills, and he smiles with satisfaction when she takes direct action against them at a local pet store. (Eventually, Ron’s life affords other bitter lessons, which Reality takes to heart: she considers his decline and his scant access to medical care, resulting from lack of insurance, alongside the rewards reaped by the C.E.O. of an unnamed pharmaceutical company that makes the kinds of painkillers on which Ron is dependent.)
Reality’s mother, Billie (Connie Britton), a social worker, is likewise committed to the betterment of society, but, as the household’s provider and organizer, she is also committed to getting herself and her children through their days efficiently and effectively. Skilled at compartmentalizing and compromising, she is less given to free-floating denunciation and repudiation than her husband. Reality has traits from both of them—her father’s principled and confrontational candor, her mother’s practicality and precision. Curious about the parts of the world that the United States demonized and waged war on in the years after 9/11, she learns Pashto. The decisive event in her life, as constructed in “Winner,” occurs in 2008, when she’s a high-school senior. An Air Force recruiter (Gino Anania) visits her school and delivers a spiel about anti-terrorist successes in Iraq; she contradicts him with the plain facts of the 2001 attacks. After she demonstrates her linguistic aptitude, he hopes to recruit her as a translator and passes word to a senior official, who gives her the hard sell, appealing to her humanitarian values. She is led to believe that, as a translator on the ground in Afghanistan, she’ll be able to help the U.S. Army help the Afghan people.
Reality signs up, expecting both to do good in the world and to escape from “a hick town full of racists.” Instead, she remains stateside, first getting two years of study in Dari and Farsi, and then translating intelligence materials to provide guidance for drone strikes. She gets to witness these strikes and, as her fellow-recruits cheer, she looks with helpless horror at the deaths (including of children) that her work has helped bring about. The effort to exonerate herself in her own mind leads her to rituals of exertion and self-punishment. She leaves the Air Force, hoping to do humanitarian work in Pakistan for an N.G.O., but that would require a college degree, which she doesn’t have. So she ends up taking a lucrative position with a private defense contractor for the N.S.A., monitoring classified material involving Iranian aviation. (One of her motives is the prospect of helping her father financially.)
The movie hits its dramatic crux an hour in, when Reality, at work at the contractor’s facility in Georgia, discovers what she deems a tragic scandal. Compelled to watch Fox News there (the channel that plays in the workspace, despite her protests), she’s made constantly aware of then President Donald Trump’s denials of Russian efforts to hack into the 2016 election systems, denials that are then amplified by right-wing pundits. Yet there’s a Russia-related folder on her computer desktop, which Reality has (illicitly) read. “The government one hundred per cent knew the Russians hacked our voting systems days before the election, yet they’re telling everyone they have no proof,” she says. “The proof is on my computer. It’s on all these people’s computers, and everyone around here is just going along with that. What the fuck?” She translates her knowledge into action: “I took an oath that said I have to protect and defend the Constitution and obey the orders of the President of the United States. But what if the information is about the President and how he got elected?”
In “Winner,” Fogel dramatizes, onscreen, Reality’s mens rea, showing the elaborate details of her plan to print, purloin, and disclose the relevant pages of the Russia file—and the combination of forethought and improvisation on which the plan’s success depends. With Reality’s voice-overs doing the bulk of the dramatic work, the movie depends heavily on editing to keep the action moving visually, and “Winner” may well prove to be one of the best-edited movies this year. (It was edited by Joseph Krings.) When Reality sends the documents to the Intercept, the action advances with a rapidity that’s all the more potent for its look behind the scenes at events that are at least superficially well-known, regarding the real-life Winner’s actions and the consequences that she faced for them.
The F.B.I.’s interrogation of Reality, soon after the publication of the documents, is shown only briefly, even as something of an anticlimax. This is in striking contrast to another movie based on the case: “Reality,” a 2023 drama directed by Tina Satter and adapted from her play, “Is This a Room?” The earlier film portrays Winner’s interrogation in detail, and its dialogue is based entirely on verbatim excerpts from the audio record of these interactions. Satter’s “Reality” has a dramatic vigor that’s missing from the corresponding scenes in Fogel’s “Winner,” but the tamped-down tone in “Winner” is actually closer to the actual tone of those interrogations, as heard firsthand in yet another film—Sonia Kennebeck’s 2021 documentary, “Reality Winner.”
Satter’s film, with its dramatization of the investigators’ formalized gamesmanship and Winner’s strategic maneuvering, is fascinating but narrow, both regarding the protagonist and the law at large. Fogel’s “Winner,” with its emphasis on what came before and after the interrogation, is the far more illuminating—and analytical—film. It presents a broad spectrum of Reality’s experiences as they influenced her actions, and then the way that the criminal-justice system proceeded to flatten her motives and the idealism that underpinned them, manipulating the picture of her that emerges in court. The movie also depicts, even more forcefully, how the calculated cruelties and the institutional brutality of the carceral system are used to break down her resistance. The soul-crushing void of solitary confinement and the constant threat of inmate-on-inmate violence appear not as aberrations but as tools on which the system tacitly relies.
Amid it all, Reality utters a brief sentence that encapsulates the movie’s outraged essence, its fundamental indignation at the disconnect between American institutions and American lives: “How is that legal?” Under the guise of a conventional bio-pic, with all of the dilution and sweetening that the commercial format entails, Fogel offers a wide-ranging and deep-rooted critique of American officialdom, of the political underpinnings of American society. In its hearty directness, “Winner” suggests that being mad as hell at a system that’s out of whack is as American as Hollywood itself. ♦
