Winner gives us a solid impression of the life Reality Winner lived before her infamous leak of intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. While it’s nothing like as groundbreaking as Tina Satter’s Reality, which approached the case as essentially a one-act play centered on the initial FBI interrogation, Winner gives us much more context for what lead to the leak, especially in terms of Reality’s general disposition.
Adapted by Kerry Howley from her own New York magazine article, Winner is often pitched as a dark comedy. This tone doesn’t always land perfectly, as a handful of situations strain credibility. However, what helps Howley and director Susanna Fogel keep things grounded is their convincing cast, especially the actors playing the Winner family. As Reality, Emilia Jones brings across a sense of the subject’s striking combination of logical, pragmatic thinking and unapologetic bleeding-heart vibes. As she rises through the ranks of the Air Force and the National Security Agency in the 2010s, working specifically in the field of translation (she was gifted in regard to world languages from a very young age), we get a sense of how she will respond to just about anything; we know the character well enough to anticipate what the beats of this story might be. That’s crucial for a film like this as it tries to thread the needle somewhere between crowd-pleasing coming-of-age story and quasi-political biography. As it stands today, Reality’s life story doesn’t follow a traditional three-act structure, but the cast and crew do as much as they can to make it fit that template.
Assisting Jones in helping us understand Reality is Zach Galifianakis as Ron Winner, Reality’s father. Sidelined from his career after a life-altering back injury, Ron impresses upon his daughter both the desire to help those less fortunate and a nuanced, perhaps cynical view of sociopolitical issues. Billie, Reality’s mother (Connie Britton) represents a more pragmatic, get-up-and-go approach to life, and, as portrayed in this film, the ups and downs in their marriage seem to have had an enormous impact on Reality’s worldview. Brittany, Reality’s sister (Kathryn Newton) is clearly her mother’s daughter, while Reality is clearly her father’s. As tensions mount regarding the leak, however, the temperament gap between the three women starts to close rather quickly. Pettiness and annoyance give way to affection and charity once your child or sibling’s freedom is threatened.
But why was Reality’s freedom threatened, exactly? Winner doesn’t get too technical on this front, preferring to give us more of a bird’s-eye view of her life thus far. One aspect of the leak I wish the film had addressed was The Intercept’s mishandling of the publication of what she leaked to them. Their work regarding the material clearly exposed her as the source, leading to her arrest and subsequent conviction and sentencing. She was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, the longest sentence ever given in the US for leaking classified documents to the media.
What the film does handle very well is its overall thesis and question to the audience: why do we say we care so much about major issues such as election integrity, but simply turn our heads and joke about the unusual name of someone who proved an attempt on the part of foreign actors to meddle in our elections? Though Winner has its fair share of jokes, it’s clearly asking us to take this stuff seriously, as we should. | George Napper
