Cinematic quality lifts Snowden documentary

Edward Snowden in a scene from Citizenfour, a documentary that intimately follows the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked surveillance information.

Edward Snowden, left, invited Glenn Greenwald, right, and filmmaker Laura Poitras to meet him in Hong Kong to share his knowledge about the NSA.

There are two ways to look at "Citizenfour," Laura Poitras' documentary about Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose revelations of widespread surveillance launched a hundred op-ed columns a year ago. The first and most obvious is as a piece of advocacy journalism, a goad to further argument about how security and transparency should be balanced in a democracy, about how governments abuse technology, about how official secrets are kept and exposed. The second is as a movie, an elegant and intelligent contribution to the flourishing genre of dystopian allegory.

Those who regard Snowden as an unambiguous hero, risking his freedom and comfort to expose abuses of power, will find much to agree with in Poitras' presentation of his actions. This film is an authorized portrait, made at its subject's invitation. In 2013, Snowden, using encrypted email under the alias "citizen four," contacted Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, inviting them to meet him in Hong Kong, where he would share what he had learned about the NSA's capacity to intercept data from the phone calls, emails and Web wanderings of U.S. citizens.

When asked why he had chosen her, Snowden, his identity still electronically shrouded, replied that she had selected herself, based on her previous work as a journalist and filmmaker, including a short documentary about William Binney, an NSA whistleblower who also appears in "Citizenfour."

And "Citizenfour," much of which consists of conversations between Snowden and Greenwald, emphasizes his bravery and his idealism, and the malignancy of the forces ranged against him. This is obviously a partial, partisan view, and several journalists on the national security and technology beats among them Fred Kaplan at Slate and Michael Cohen (formerly of The Guardian) at The Daily Beast have pointed out omissions and simplifications. Those criticisms, and George Packer's long, respectful and skeptical profile of Poitras in a recent issue of The New Yorker, express the desire for a middle ground, a balance between the public right to know and the government's need to collect intelligence in the fight against global terrorism.

Fair enough, I guess. Such balance may be a journalistic shibboleth; it is not necessarily a cinematic virtue. "The Fifth Estate," last year's nondocumentary attempt to tell the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, was bogged down in the pursuit of sensible moderation, losing the chance to write history in lightning.

"Citizenfour," happily, suffers no such fate. Cinema, even in the service of journalism, is always more than reporting, and focusing on what Poitras' film is about risks ignoring what it is. It's a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the "Bourne" movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film. And it is also a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.

Snowden's face is by now well known it has been printed on demonstrators' masks and stylized posters but when he first encounters Poitras and her camera, he is anonymous and invisible, a nervous young man in a Hong Kong hotel room. He is shy, pale and serious, explaining his actions and motives in a mixture of technical jargon and lofty moral rhetoric. While he seems almost naive about the machinery of celebrity that is about to catch him in its gears, he is adamant in his desire to take public responsibility for his actions, partly to protect others who might be blamed. At the same time, he defers to Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, a reporter for The Guardian, about when, how and how much of the information he is passing on will be shared with their readers.

Maybe some of this is ordinary-guy shtick, but it hardly matters. What makes Snowden fascinating a great movie character, whatever you think of his cause is the combination of diffidence, resolve and unpretentious intelligence that makes him so familiar. Slightly hipsterish, vaguely nerdy, with a trace of the coastal South in his voice (he was born in North Carolina and grew up mostly in Maryland), he is someone you might have seen at Starbucks or college or Bonnaroo. One of us, you might say.

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Cinematic quality lifts Snowden documentary