My Patron-Funded Look at the Films of Oliver Stone Comes to an Anti-Climactic Close with 2015's Underwhelming Snowden
500 Days of a Socio-Political Bummer.
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Not too long ago, a kind-hearted, much-appreciated patron sent me on a journey unusual even by this site’s exceedingly lenient standards. He wanted me to watch and write about the complete filmography of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
That, in itself, is not terribly unusual. Stone is incontrovertibly a major filmmaker. If you were a child of the 1980s, as I was, he was more than that. He was arguably the most important American filmmaker. At least that’s how he was treated by critics and the media: as a staggeringly essential auteur whose incendiary message movies were treated not just as art or entertainment but news as well.
But I fucking HATE Oliver Stone. I hate him as a filmmaker. I hate him as a propagandist. I hate him as a cultural figure and I must also concede that I’m not crazy him as a person either.
But I took the assignment anyway because I desperately needed the money and work and also because I thought watching and writing about every narrative film made by a filmmaker you absolutely despise would be an interesting experiment.
Would Stockholm syndrome kick in at some point? Or maybe I would discover that I had failed to appreciate Stone in my angry, rebellious youth but finally understood him as a world-weary forty-six year old man who has been kicked in the nuts by life, HARD, again and again and again.
Before I began the project there were a number of movies on Stone’s resume that I had never gotten around to seeing due to my intense, soul-consuming dislike for Stone, his style, his aesthetic and his films.
I’m talking about movies like Seizure, The Hand, Platoon, Heaven and Earth, Alexander, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages and finally Snowden.
I have now seen all of those movies and re-watched all of Stone’s others, even the real stinkers. I can now say with absolute certainty that I still fucking hate Oliver Stone and his movies.
If anything, this project has made me dislike Stone even more. My intense hatred of the man and his life’s work is now more informed and granular. I now REALLY know Stone’s movies and I REALLY don’t care for them.
Snowden is a tale Stone loves to tell in different iterations, a heroic coming-of-age story about a brilliant, handsome, exceptionally capable white man burning with idealism, ambition and a need to make a name for himself who enters a hyper-masculine realm and discovers that the world is infinitely darker and more corrupt than he previously imagined.
That’s Charlie Sheen in Platoon and Wall Street. It’s also Tom Cruise’s Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison, Colin Farrell’s title character in Alexander, Shia LeBouef in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and finally Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Snowden.
Stone never stopped being a wide-eyed boy on a perpetual quest for heroes to believe in unconditionally. That’s Stone’s approach to freakishly accomplished computer super-genius turned whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
Snowden is pure hagiography that depicts its diminutive hero as in a next-generation cross between Jesus Christ, hero of the New Testament, Matthew Broderick in Wargames and a one-man Woodward and Bernstein team speaking truth to power. But on the internet! Using computers!
Ayn Rand is referenced as a formative influence on Snowden’s thinking. The film clearly sees him as an Objectivist hero, an individualist willing to go against the system and its awesome, awful power rather than compromise his principles and his integrity.
To put things in appropriately hyperbolic terms, the film’s slightly built hero is prepared to stop the world’s engine rather than suffer the deceit and lies of his employers in silent acquiescence.
The poorly received biopic hops around in time as it chronicles Edward Snowden’s evolution from Conservative rule-follower to free-thinking whistleblower. Stone and the film are in awe of everything about Snowden, but they are particularly impressed by his mind.
Snowden depicts its subject’s intellect as nothing short of super-human. It doesn’t just make him different, and also, better than other people; it makes him a goddamn superhero.
Like Superman or Captain America, Snowden just wants to serve humanity. He’s a humble servant vibrating with patriotism and passion, particularly post-9/11 but he doesn’t have the height or the strength to be an effective soldier.
So he takes his terrifying intellect into the shadowy world of the CIA and later the NSA where he makes a discovery that shocks and chills him to his very core: the government is SPYING ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE!
Maybe I’m cynical but my response to that blockbuster information was, “Of COURSE the government is spying on people. That’s pretty much what governments do: trash collection, public schools, police and of course spying on an unwitting populace.
Snowden feels differently. He is shocked beyond words to discover that the NSA and CIA are behaving in a less than ethical and transparent manner and begins plotting ways to bring this boffo, mind-blowing information to the public in a way that will open the eyes of the sheeple and really blow the minds of some uptight squares.
I had forgotten that Nicolas Cage was in Snowden so when he popped up early in the proceedings as an early colleague of Snowden’s I legitimately smiled and experienced a surge of excitement and anticipation. It quickly passed.
I figured that Snowden might suck but I was definitely going to enjoy what Cage was bringing to the table. That turned out to be true. Snowden is a forgettable mediocrity that feels more like a television movie than big-screen fare but I loved the eccentric air of resignation Cage brings to the role of a lifer who has seen all of the ugliness and duplicity the world has to offer and is biding his time until retirement.
It’s a character unlike any Cage has played before. The man is introduced wearing a cardigan to work but Cage only enlivens the movie for about ten minutes, then disappears until the very end so that he can give a long-distance thumbs up to his long-ago coworker to congratulate him on exposing all the liars and the lies, like a real-world version of Neil Breen in Fateful Findings.
Snowden begins the movie a pure-hearted true believer and a bit of a naive dope. Working in some of the most shadowy, secretive institutions in American society robs him of his innocence but instills in him a passionate desire to make a difference no matter the cost.
Stone fails to make acquiring and disseminating data on a historic scale cinematic and ends up simplifying the complicated, sometimes wonky issues at play.
As it stumbles to an unsatisfactory close Snowden amps up the hero worship. It depicts Snowden as not just heroic but humanity’s e-savior, a man so brilliant and strong-willed that he can single-handedly make the world a better, less secretive place.
Stone clearly sees a lot of himself in Snowden but that adoration keeps him from seeing Snowden in all of his contradictions and complexity.
For a message movie about the recent past the filmmaker clearly feels passionately about, Snowden is strangely lacking in passion and urgency. It already feels like an irrelevant period piece despite only being six years old.
Snowden ends my journey through Stone’s complete filmography on an anti-climactic note. It finds him struggling and failing to be relevant, to engage with a world he doesn’t seem to recognize or understand.
To paraphrase Jim Morrison, this is the end, my movie-watching friend, the end.
Thanks for going on the journey with me. It’s been tough in parts but we made it! I am going to celebrate by never watching another Oliver Stone movie ever again.
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