Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Open Road)

Snowden has a lot of ground to cover. It wants to make you care about the inner conflicts of its title character as much as it’s concerned with his public persona. It also has a pretty clear political argument about the role of the government in everyday life. It wrings drama and suspense from tasks that are not inherently cinematic: composing documents, transferring files, thinking.

Director Oliver Stone, who wrote the script with Kieran Fitzgerald, is well-known for injecting political beliefs into fact-based Hollywood dramatizations, and his latest is no exception. Viewers who prefer ambiguity may be disappointed, but Stone’s potent filmmaking expertise should distract them from the political grandstanding. The movie works as a straight-ahead romantic drama, a surprise given the hokey advance publicity.

Showing Snowden from his early days in the military through his recent exploits, Stone and Fitzgerald build a structure that straddles the line between episodic and propulsive. The film opens with events that have been well-documented: Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald (a tightly wound Zachary Quinto) and filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo, underserved) in Hong Kong to reveal classified documents that expose widespread government surveillance of personal electronic devices. Extended flashback sequences fill in the evolution of Snowden’s thinking, as unflappable patriotism gives way to unconscionable paranoia.

While the flashbacks are absorbing on their own merits, they adhere to a well-trod formula. Snowden demonstrates early on his extraordinary coding prowess, and a few friendly meetings with NSA employee Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage, in an unexpectedly thankless role) sow the seeds for his distrust of his employer. Meanwhile, he quickly enters a serious relationship with photographer Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who tries to bring him out of his quasi-conservative shell. (They first meet at Tryst, the popular Adams Morgan coffee shop.)

If you can get past some truly shoddy accent work, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mousy stoicism lends heft to even the more familiar proceedings, and his rapport with Shailene Woodley yields the movie’s strongest returns, as the turmoil of the relationship provides the outsized story elements with a human-scale perspective. Though the script threatens to reduce Lindsay to an archetype, Woodley brings enough tenderness and force of will to hold her own.

The movie works best in isolated moments that combine heightened suspense and black comedy. One scene pits Snowden against a wall-length Skype call with one of his former superiors, CIA recruiter Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), as the tightening shot binds the two closer and closer together. Another finds Snowden struggling to focus on lovemaking as he imagines the laptop webcam a few feet away capturing every moment. Quinto gets a spotlight scene worthy of a highlight reel when Greenwald unleashes an outburst on one of his bosses back in England.

Perhaps inevitably, the movie leaves something to be desired. The danger of dramatizing recent events is that the filmmaker has to find a new angle on well-known public figures. Stone attempts to frame it as an heroic victory, and asserts in no uncertain terms that he endorses what Snowden did and how he did it. Setting aside political debates, that’s a far less compelling characterization than a nuanced examination of his weaknesses and character flaws could have been.

A scene near the end of the film exemplifies this problem and left me questioning much of what came before. You’ll know this jarring, disruptive scene when you see it. It’s a testament to the movie’s engaging first two hours that its misguided last 15 minutes rankle. When Snowden tries to tell a real-life story through a thin layer of fictionalization, it stumbles. But in that clumsy process, Snowden finds grace notes in unexpected places.

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Snowden
Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone
With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo
Rated R for language and some sexuality/nudity
134 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you