14 Days of Paranoia #8: Reality (dir by Tina Satter)

One day in 2017, Reality Winner (Sidney Sweeney), a yoga instructor who also works as a government translator, returns home from grocery shopping to discover that the FBI is outside of her house. Agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchant Davis) have a search warrant and they explain that they also have some questions to ask her.

At first, both Garrick and Taylor are very friendly. In fact, they’re almost too friendly. Whenever Reality asks for more details about what is going on, they ask her about her pets or about whether or not she enjoys her job. They ask her about her background and about the last trip she went on. The conversation is cheerful but it’s hard not to notice that, while Garrick is smiling, burly FBI agents are ransacking Reality’s house. As Reality comes to realize, she actually is in a lot of trouble. Because she sent classified material to the Intercept, she is about to be arrested and prosecuted under the espionage act. It’s going to be a while before she sees her house again.

Reality was released last year and aired on HBO. It’s a film about which I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it showed how the government goes about prosecuting its citizens. From the minute that Reality started talking to the FBI agents, I started yelling at her to shut up and get a lawyer. No matter how many times they ask about your dog or how interested they seem to be in your recent trip to South America, agents of the FBI are not your friends! Since the film’s script was largely a transcript of the actual interrogation, Reality presented a lesson in just how exactly law enforcement agencies like the FBI lure people into a false sense of security before dropping the trap on them.

On the other hand, this film also left me wondering just how much of a dumbass one has to be to throw away their career and their freedom for a trash organization like The Intercept. Reality says that she was 1) upset over the election of Donald Trump (understandable) and 2) she resented being forced to watch Fox News at work when she would have rather watched Al Jazeera. One needn’t be a fan of Fox to realize how ludicrous it is to suggest that Al Jazeera would somehow be less propagandistic.

There’s a moment, at the start of the film, where Reality — while standing outside of her house — stares at a toy truck on the other side of the street. The toy has a big Confederate flag decal on it and the symbolism is so heavy-handed that it almost made me laugh out loud. It leaves the viewer with no doubt that the film is very much on Reality Winner’s side and the film does her a great favor by casting the instantly likable Sydney Sweeney in the title role. (Oddly, we occasionally see pictures of the actual Reality Winner over the course of the film, all of which invertedly serve to remind us that the real person is not as appealing as the actress playing her.) Josh Hamilton and Marchant Davis are both appropriately menacing as the passive aggressive FBI agent and the scene where Hamilton goes from being friendly to being serious is truly jolting.

Since the film’s script is based on the actual transcripts of the interrogation, director Tina Satter inserts a film glitch whenever the characters mention anything that has been redacted. The film’s best moment comes when a particularly big redaction causes the FBI agents to vanish all together and, for a few moments, Reality can actually catch her breath and is free from their questions. The film did not make me any more sympathetic to Reality Winner (and, for all of its claims to historic veracity, it leaves out the moment she told her father that she wouldn’t be prosecuted because she was pretty and blonde) but it did make me feel empathy for anyone who has ever been targeted by the government. When the film’s epilogue suggests that Reality Winner was prosecuted and imprisoned for a relatively minor offense solely to scare off other whistleblowers, it’s hard not to disagree.

14 Days of Paranoia: