‘Citizenfour’ a compelling look at Edward Snowden’s actions

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This in essence is the message of "Citizenfour," Laura Poitras' highly anticipated documentary on Edward Snowden's decision to expose the National Security Agency's ravenous appetite for clandestinely collecting the personal data of ordinary citizens. If left unchecked, the film persuasively posits, this lust for information on an unprecedented scale could mean the end of privacy as we know it.

Because Poitras was among the first people Snowden contacted, because she became involved in the process, this is first and foremost an advocacy documentary with a compelling you-are-there quality. It puts us in the room where Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald, his key conduit to the outside world, conferred in Hong Kong's Mira Hotel over eight days as they made decisions about what was to be published and why.

These extensive hotel conversations are terribly exciting, but they take up so much of "Citizenfour's" running time they also result in a more limited film than viewers may be expecting. What we get is as much an edited record of those historic high-tension days as an examination of the issues surrounding electronic surveillance. "Citizenfour" is a formidable viewing experience, but it's not necessarily a problem-free film.

Poitras, a superb documentarian whose previous work includes "My Country, My Country" and "The Oath," was already working on a documentary about governmental surveillance when, in a scenario worthy of John le Carre or even Eric Ambler, she was contacted by a source identified only as "Citizenfour."

Insisting on fierce security protocols over and above the ones Poitras, herself a target of surveillance, already employed, Citizenfour and the filmmaker exchanged email messages for months, some of which appear on the screen and are read by Poitras in a calm, poised, quietly effective voice.

Citizenfour encourages Poitras and Greenwald, a journalist for Britain's the Guardian, to work together. After some six months of complex email conversations, the three of them meet in that Hong Kong hotel to make final plans.

Given how much he's been in the news since then, one key fascination of "Citizenfour" is the intimate glimpse it gives us of Snowden, whose slight frame and boyish looks bring to mind Abraham Lincoln's apocryphal remark on meeting "Uncle Tom's Cabin" author Harriet Beecher Stowe: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Yet the more we see of Snowden, whether talking to hotel reception or slipping under a blanket ("my magic mantle of power") in order to hide his keyboard strokes from the camera's eye, the more we see not only his intelligence and the strength of his resolve but the linked idealism and zealotry that must have motivated his actions.

Snowden's articulate passion about the NSA's extensive data gathering ("the reach of the system is unlimited ... it's not science fiction, it's happening right now") fuels the argument he lays out in increasingly chilling and convincing detail about why it would take nothing more than "a change of policy" to turn this apparatus into "the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of the world."

Link:
'Citizenfour' a compelling look at Edward Snowden's actions