Disappointingly Simple for Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone is known for controversy and courage in his political biographical films. In JFK he crafted a terrific thriller about the (now mostly debunked) truth behind the Kennedy assassination; in Nixon he dared to make a tragic, empathetic film about a universally disliked figure; and with the uneven W. he made the case for George W. Bush's humanity and heart despite his poor governance while the man was still in office. Oliver Stone is as good at bringing an unexpected perspective to his biopics as he is at adding dramatic flourishes based on sometimes true events. Snowden tells the eponymous whistleblower's story with a bit of the latter, but a disappointing lack of the former.
Stone gives us a conventional tale of a young, proud American who becomes dismayed at his own government's actions toward its citizens, and who risks everything to bring attention to those acts. For those like myself only familiar with scant details of Snowden's info dump, Stone's film succeeds at giving us more of the story, but without providing a fuller picture.
I'm no fan of undue surveillance, but I wish Snowden gave more of a counter argument as to why it was considered necessary. Terror is used as an excuse, but there must be more to it than that. The surveillance was operational under two very different presidents (Bush and Obama), and given their differences I must ask: why would they both embrace the same intrusive intelligence gathering tools? The answer may not be satisfactory, neither on a legal nor moral level, but it's one the film doesn't provide because it never poses the question. Obama's election in 2008 plays a role in Snowden returning to government work thinking things would be different, only to find they got worse. Maybe that's really all there is too it, but there could have been a more nuanced exploration of that in the film, because it's very one sided as presented by Stone and the Snowden character, and the movie suffers for it.
Beyond the moral conundrum of the surveillance program, the film's only shortcoming is its inability to find more nuance in Snowden's motivations. It may again be a case of the man and his motivations being more straightforward than seems likely, but ultimately he comes across as a very morally grounded person in an often amoral part of the government. He may be a do-gooder, but how did he acquire that worldview and strong moral center? It's not really explored here. Adding some necessary humanity to Stone's interpretation of the man is a performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that reveals a physical and emotional vulnerability that audience members would not likely get from their nightly news. Gordon-Levitt successfully portrays a young man who feels like the state secrets he's carrying, even those that aren't morally questionable, are deeply important, and that sense of duty is admirable and essential to a portrait of someone it's easy to paint as a villain.
As I understand it, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour is likely the richer source for Snowden's story than this film (for what it's worth, director Laura Poitras is depicted filming it in Snowden). Oliver Stone has crafted a biopic that provides the essentials of the story in a numbingly straightforward manner. Gone is his courageous habit of finding unpopular perspectives, and gone is the wildly creative and engaging editing on display in JFK and Nixon. Snowden is disappointingly conventional, because it's an Oliver Stone movie without any of the filmmaker's personality.