[The HBO film adapts the FBI transcript from Reality Winner’s
interrogation into a stunning thriller.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

REALITY, STARRING SYDNEY SWEENEY, IS UNSETTLING, VITAL VIEWING  
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Alissa Wilkinson
May 29, 2023
Vox
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_ The HBO film adapts the FBI transcript from Reality Winner’s
interrogation into a stunning thriller. _

Sydney Sweeney as whistleblower Reality Winner in Reality. , HBO

 

Alissa Wilkinson
[[link removed]] covers film and
culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics
Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

When the play that would one day become the extraordinary
drama _Reality_ premiered off-Broadway, its whistleblower
protagonist was still in a federal prison.

Back then, in February 2019, the show was called _Is This a Room_
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an enigmatic quote from the show itself. An FBI agent looks into the
place — it’s definitely a room — where two of his colleagues are
interrogating the diminutive 25-year-old woman who lives there, and he
makes the inquiry. He seems to be asking if the space needs to be
searched. But it’s a strange, off-kilter query, one nobody would
really know how to answer. Of course this is a room; what else would
it be? It’s like asking where “here” is. Or whether reality
exists.

There’s an ironic vigor to _Reality_’s narrative, a practically
allegorical sense that it was constructed by a lightly ham-fisted
author with something to prove. It’s a story about truth and twisted
facts, about shadows and subterfuge, and the woman at its center is
literally named Reality.

What makes it so strange, and so chilling, is that nobody wrote it at
all.

The text of _Reality_, like the play it’s based on, is a verbatim
replica, including redactions, of the FBI’s transcript of its
interrogation of Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner
on June 3, 2017. Playwright and director Tina Satter pulled the
transcript onto the stage, and now she and co-screenwriter James Paul
Dallas have moved it — to incredible effect — onto the screen,
starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt
Davis as the agents interrogating her.

[Two FBI agents and a young woman stand in an almost-empty room.]

Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, and Marchánt Davis in _Reality._ 

HBO

_Reality_ is, quite literally, the kind of movie where people just
talk the whole time. But that’s precisely why it works. The dialogue
(unaltered, with a key exception, from the stage production and thus
the FBI’s transcript) has that greatest of theatrical qualities:
Nobody is ever saying quite what they mean, and you are riveted,
trying to figure out what they’re thinking, the balance of power
shifting back and forth. That it works so well on screen is a
tremendous testimony to both Satter’s directorial chops and the
actors’ performances.

The real Reality Winner, you may recall from the headlines
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was accused and convicted of leaking an intelligence report regarding
attempted Russian hacking of voter rolls during the 2016 election.
“I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she told the
agents. Later, she told the media that she felt the government was
intentionally misleading its citizens about Russia’s attempts to
upend the election, and so she printed out a file and mailed it
to the Intercept [[link removed]], which promised its
sources anonymity.

The government found out and arrived on her doorstep even before the
Intercept published the reports. For the crime of “removing
classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a
news outlet,” she was sentenced to five years and three months in
federal prison — the longest ever imposed for this crime. And,
incredibly, she was repeatedly denied bail, ultimately remaining there
for just shy of four years, even as Congress and other government
officials spoke about what she’d revealed publicly. Though she was
transferred to a transitional facility on June 2, 2021, Winner never
saw the show about her when it opened on Broadway that October —
because she was still under house arrest.

Translating play to screen results in subtle changes. When the show
was still on stage, redactions in the transcripts were staged
visually, the audience briefly plunged into blackness, a switch
flipped that left you disoriented in the audience. As a medium, film
has a little more to play with visually, so instead we see Sweeney’s
image fuzz out and disappear, then reappear every time the redaction
ends.

There’s also context-setting by way of news clips; at the start, we
see Winner in her cubicle, Fox News coverage of FBI Director James
Comey’s testimony before Congress blaring from a TV on the wall.
(Later, she’ll tell the agents that she repeatedly asked for the TVs
to be switched to anything other than Fox News — Al Jazeera, or just
pictures of people’s pets — and it greatly upset her.) Sometimes
events and dates about which the characters are speaking are cut
together with the real Reality’s images or Instagram posts; once in
a while we see a waveform of the tapes, or hear some static, or see
the transcript being typed, a way to remind us that what we are
watching is not fiction.

Or not exactly, anyhow.

[A young white woman in a white button-down looks worried.]

Sydney Sweeney in _Reality._ 

HBO

Most significantly, some of the redactions in the play have become
un-redacted in the meantime. Many of them concerned the news outlet to
which Winner leaked the document; the film eventually starts saying
“the Intercept” out loud, and it’s a bit shocking at first. The
reasoning seems clear. In November 2021, just after the Broadway show
closed, Winner blasted
[[link removed]] the
Intercept for its handling of the documents, the handling of
which may have been responsible
[[link removed]] for
her identification by the FBI (and which became a huge problem for
the publication
[[link removed]]).
Visually, _Reality_ makes the case that the Intercept screwed up.
Small wonder.

The question at the center of _Reality_ is complex. When it was a
play, it was an inquiry into Winner’s motives. Why would a young
woman who wants, as she repeatedly tells the agents, to be deployed
— to get out of her dead-end position as a Farsi translator and
actually use her extensive language skills — do something she knows
is illegal? What “pushed her over the edge,” as one of the agents
asks?

But as a movie, with the attendant close-ups on faces the medium
provides, the question grows. Emotional complexity, the manifold
feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts
to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see
what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving
demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us
to do anything like that. Winner’s military record can’t save her.
The fact that she speaks three languages spoken in the Middle East is
called “impressive” many times by the agents, but each time the
repetition is more loaded — it’s going to be used against her, we
realize, to suggest her sympathies lie elsewhere (and so it was). The
FBI isn’t on her side; they don’t even bother to read her Miranda
rights. Well-worn gender dynamics suddenly become a factor, with
Winner seemingly forced into joking about her cat being obese to
pacify the men, sickeningly recognizable to women who’ve ever felt
the need to play along for self-protection.

After her arrest, media reports — stitched into the film, lest the
journalistic outlets conveniently forget — include people saying
that, for instance, Winner is “a person who had taken a key interest
in the Middle East, with suspicious motives,” that she “claimed to
hate America,” that she was a “quintessential example of an inside
threat.” Even the news outlet that was supposed to protect her, that
provided such careful instructions for leakers who wish to remain
anonymous, screwed it all up, and _she_ paid the price.

_REALITY _PULLS OUT A SLEDGEHAMMER

Watching _Reality_ marks the third time I’ve seen Satter’s
adaptation of Winner’s interrogation. Each time, I’m left angry
and unsettled. Like many Americans, especially white middle-class
women, I was raised to believe that my government messes up sometimes
but is essentially on my side. That we are the good guys, a government
by the people, for the people, and that we don’t imprison people
here just to make sure nobody ever dares to do something like making
sure we’re told the truth about our own elections. We lionize the
brave person who speaks out. When we get older, and wiser, and maybe
more skeptical, that bedrock belief remains: that the truth will
protect us.

To that, _Reality _pulls out a sledgehammer, and a host of
institutions failing to fulfill their own lofty promises. Is anyone
doing what they’re supposed to do? If the US government is willing
to impose a harsh sentence on someone like Reality Winner, what are we
supposed to think? What else is false? Is reality real?

Is this a room?

Reality _premieres on HBO on May 29 at 10 pm ET and will stream on
Max._

* Reality Winner
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* Reality
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* HBO
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* whistleblower
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* The intercept
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* FBI
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* Russian Election Meddling; US Election Meddling
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