Reality, the coolly absorbing tale of a millennial whistleblower, starts with an overhead view of a nondescript office on the day Donald Trump fired FBI Chief James Comey: May 9 2017. Flat-screens on the wall show rolling reports on Fox News, but otherwise, an eerie quiet prevails. We’re not privy to the exact moment when something flipped inside Reality Leigh Winner (Sydney Sweeney), who’s seated in the shot, but it had to do with fury and a sense of powerlessness.
A month later, she was accosted by FBI agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis), who took her inside her home for questioning. She was slow to admit any wrongdoing; then admitted part of it; then tried to engage with their deepest concerns, about her motivation in leaking a classified NSA document to The Intercept, an online news source. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she remarked, in one of the most-publicised lines.
Giving us a precise sense of how her arrest went down is the film’s brief, and using the exact transcript of the FBI’s recordings is a foolproof way to go about it. Before conceiving it on camera, director Tina Satter adapted the same event into a piece of verbatim theatre, Is This a Room, which ran off-Broadway.
Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge. When Winner mentions something that’s redacted on the page, Sweeney briefly vanishes on...
Foley partner Lisa Noller, Chair of the Firm’s Litigation Department, will be speaking at the American Bar Association’s Qui Tam & Civil False Claims and Healthcare Fraud Institute in Washingt...