Hero Or Traitor?

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2017)

I watched this movie with no real stake in it. I'm aware of Edward Snowden and have a little bit of familiarity with what he did, but I don't really have a position on whether he's a hero or a traitor. The perspective of this movie is clear. Directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, it's hardly surprising that the film falls on the "hero" side of that question. And, to the extent that the movie is an accurate portrayal of events, that's certainly an arguable position to take.
The movie presents us with basically ten years of Snowden's life. He begins as a soldier, trying to get into Special Ops, but he just isn't good enough and eventually is discharged because he's not physically up to the job. He ends up working for the CIA (and later the NSA) and during those years we see a gradual evolution in his understanding of his work. He progresses from a man who simply wanted to serve his country and help keep it safe to someone who concluded that the country he was serving wasn't the country he thought it was. One gets the impression that his real disappointment was in Barack Obama, who became president but changed nothing. His disillusionment, caused by his growing realization that a lot of the American intelligence services were actually busy primarily keeping tabs illegally on every day, law-abiding Americans, eventually leads to his decision to become a whistle blower and finally a man without a country - living in Russia, but with no place really to go. He did have the satisfaction, though, of seeing his leaks result in the surveillance program being supposedly cancelled. (Although - who knows?)
The movie provided a fascinating (and somewhat frightening) look at the ability of US Intelligence to keep track of its citizens activities (and presumably other countries have the same ability.) It's hard to watch this and not feel just a little bit paranoid, although I've been able to resist the temptation to put a band-aid over my laptop camera lens. And yet, while perhaps frightening, it's also hard not to be grudgingly impressed by what you see. Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a fine job as Snowden. I also liked Gordon- Levitt's work in "The Walk." He's become a very fine actor since his early days as Tommy on "3rd Rock From The Sun." The movie has as its background Snowden's meeting with two reporters to whom he gives the classified information that he stole (who are played by Melissa Leo and Zachary Quinto, who both were good but weren't really central in my opinion to the point of the movie, except that they facilitated the information getting out to the public.) There was a lot of reflection on Snowden's relationship with his girlfriend Lindsay, played by Shailene Woodley. Theirs was an up and down relationship - not surprisingly perhaps, since Snowden had to keep so much of his life and work secret even from her. Woodley, who I'm not familiar with, was fine in the role - and quite lovely as well. I was pleasantly surprised to discover in the captions as the movie ended that Lindsay had joined Snowden and now lives with him in Moscow.
My biggest criticism of the movie is that it was rather slow moving, and I thought a bit disjointed. There were times when I was having some trouble fitting all the various pieces together. It was an interesting movie, but it wasn't a movie that captivated me or held me spellbound. In the end, while I'm more sympathetic to Snowden, I also understand why the hero or traitor question is still an open one. It's certainly a complicated issue that will probably always polarize people.