WINNER - Mark Reviews Movies

Winner, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2024

By the time Winner gets at its main point, the movie has already lost its way. This is the story of Reality Winner, an interpreter for the U.S. Air Force and, later, the National Security Agency by way of a private service contractor. She is known for two things: her unique name and leaking a classified document that made it clear Russian operatives interfered with the 2016 presidential election in the United States. One of those facts stuck to the public consciousness, and it wasn't the one that was more important for U.S. citizens to know.

The problem with Kerry Howley and director Susanna Fogel's screenplay is that it focuses on the eponymous figure in ways that don't really matter to the most important thing about her. It's a biography that builds toward her decision to leak that document and the legal fallout of her actions, and while it's somewhat interesting to get some idea of why Winner did what she did, we would have no reason to have any interest in her if she hadn't done that in the first place.

That's not to say Winner's story before the leak, as dramatized here, isn't fascinating. It is to a certain degree, as a young woman who was raised to have an activist's mind ends up working inside the very systems of which she is suspicious. When all of that story is told as an explanation for a single act, though, it's strange the act itself comes across as an afterthought within the narrative.

Instead, this is fairly routine biography, with Reality (Emilia Jones) narrating her own story with a sense of flippant and sarcastic humor—a tone that might have gotten the real Winner in hotter water than she otherwise would have been. The more political of her parents is her father Ronald (Zach Galifianakis), a man who seems to be looking for as many hills on which to die as he possibly can.

Reality's mother Billie (Connie Britton) is far more pragmatic, wondering why her husband would twist a common sentiment about not dying on a particular hill in such a way. As a kid (played by Annelise Pollmann), Reality releases some purebred dogs from a pet store, and after the attacks of September 11, 2001, she becomes interested in studying Middle Eastern languages, hoping that she might one day use that knowledge to avoid conflict and violence.

She's a pretty smart kid and, hoping to get out of the small town in Texas where she grew up, a much smarter teenager and young adult. After pushing back at an Air Force recruiter at her high school, Reality gets a call from a higher-up in that branch of the military, who promises her that her foreign language skills would be put to helping people if she enlists. Reality does, but then, reality hits, when her translation abilities are exclusively used to find local targets for drone strikes in Afghanistan.

The portrait of Reality here is a clear one. She's driven by her independence, her need to do something of good with her life, and, once it becomes apparent that the military won't be an outlet for that second goal, guilt. Reality pushes herself physically and mentally as a kind of atonement for the deaths her translation work led to, imagining that a certain number of pushups at the gym, a certain amount of time jogging the streets, or completing a certain charitable task will balance the scales of her conscience.

Jones is very good here, exuding intelligence, a certain rebellious charm, and a harsh determination to do whatever Reality sets her mind to. The introduction to her character has Reality's voice-over stating that some people perceive her as a traitor and others see her as a hero, but all of that, again, comes down to the later act that will make her briefly infamous and quickly forgotten by the public record. In terms of her as a person outside of that, Reality is presented here as a clever young woman, whose only flaws, perhaps, are that she's too forthright about her goals, even at the cost of a romantic relationship with a genuinely decent guy named Andre (Danny Ramirez), and her opinions, even if that means calling out her mother when she decides to divorce Reality's father because of the consequences of his addiction to prescription painkillers.

We understand her and, at times, admire Reality's straightforward attitude and desire to do something of value for others. This, of course, makes the entire third act, which follows Reality's frustration with Russian election influence being called a "hoax" and her decision to take that document out of the NSA and the government's technically legal methods of trying to break her down, a loaded proposition. The movie gives us a sympathetic figure, caught up in all of this, and that's fine.

Movies can have a point of view about such matters, but Winner oddly plays these developments safe, straight down the middle, and with more attention on Reality's experience than what she revealed. That brings us right back the main issue with this movie. It's about a subject who's actually important for only one reason, and the filmmakers go out of their way to evade addressing that topic in a direct way. This may be an interesting story, but it's still the wrong one.

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