September 15, 2016 - "“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again,” said filmmaker Jean Renoir, who could have been describing the man who made “Snowden.” Like the best Stone films—“Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Wall Street”—“Snowden” is the story of a young idealist who suffers a moral crisis compounded by Oedipal fury against the father figure in whom he has lost faith.
In this case, young Edward (Gordon-Levitt replicating the real Snowden’s affectless, robotic voice), distinguishes himself as the star pupil of Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans, shadowy and sinister), a composite CIA figure who shares a similar surname with O’Brien, the Thought Policeman of George Orwell’s “1984.” Snowden is attracted to the CIA because, as he explains to an instructor (Nicolas Cage), his “sin” is computers. Retorts the instructor, not completely joking, “Then you’ve come to the right whorehouse!” In Snowden’s desire to serve his country, he accepts postings in Geneva, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii, where he works on programs that he believes will safeguard U.S. security.
Yet the more Snowden learns of the post-9/11 intel protocols, the more he’s convinced that government agencies like the NSA and CIA are abusing the Fourth Amendment—the one that guarantees Americans’ right to privacy. For most of Gordon-Levitt’s terrific performance, he plays Snowden like one hiding in plain sight. But when his Snowden finds that a backup program he has designed to protect privacy is being used instead to invade it, his conscience—and colors—emerge, and he flinches as though shot through the heart. The wordless scene recalls J. Robert Oppenheimer’shorror when he saw the unintended consequences of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians and said, “We physicists have knownsin.”
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