Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis, Josh Hamilton
Intro:
… a highly unsettling look at the imbalance in power dynamics across bureaucratic and gender lines …
Reality was declared an enemy of Trump’s America. Specifically, Reality Winner, who leaked a classified NSA document to the public, concerning Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Adapting her own stage play Is This A Room, co-writer/director Tina Satter’s dramatisation of Reality’s arrest at the hands of FBI agents on the 3rd of June 2017, uses the transcript from the actual audio recording of the arrest for all the dialogue spoken on-screen.
The drama exclusively takes place between Reality (Sydney Sweeney) and agents Taylor (Marchánt Davis) and Garrick (Josh Hamilton), with most of the film taking place in a barren backroom in Reality’s Georgia home.
Like Kitty Green’s The Assistant and fellow theatre adaptation Una, the dread that permeates so much of this film comes out of simple, mundane conversation; casual niceties over pets and yoga to establish the façade of normality, of an even ground for all in the conversation, until a massive break occurs.
This break is two-fold. There’s the literal break shown through the editing of Jennifer Vecchiarello and Ron Dulin, accounting for the redacted parts of the original transcript and adding much-needed variety to the visuals. And then there’s the more emotional break, as Reality is slowly but surely whittled down over the course of a tense and disproportionate grilling in a room that she already admits to creeping her out on the best of days.
Reality has the obvious structure and framing of a stage play, but through the psychological textures offered by Paul Yee’s cinematography, the physical blocking from the actors, and Sweeney’s authentic performance, all elevating the material by making use of what cinema has and theatre doesn’t by design.
As the FBI questioning becomes more pointed, and the shell Reality has retreated into begins to crack, the film effectively manages to humanise her. Someone whose first concern isn’t her own freedom, but that her pets are taken care of, and who reached the end of her tether after one too many Fox News broadcasts at work (a perfectly sane situation to be in between 2016 and 2020… and beyond).
In the doco Citizenfour, Edward Snowden made it a point of saying that the information was much more important than himself. But of course, information isn’t what gets put into handcuffs on its own front porch. Ideas don’t get thrown into jail for sharing what should already have been available to the public. People do. And in creating this docudrama (arguably earning that distinction more than most modern efforts), Satter and Sweeney take great pains to present Reality the person, more so than Reality the whistleblower.
Reality is a stage play adaptation done right, taking a single room and three actors, and generating so much crippling anxiety from its factual source material that you’d almost wonder why any other production would bother splurging on anything more. Low-key, it’s a highly unsettling look at the imbalance in power dynamics across bureaucratic and gender lines; but high-key, it’s a dramatic indictment of those who purport to protect and present the truth, when they’re really only concerned with protecting from the truth.
