I’m inclined to be a little possessive, re: Sydney Sweeney. Until recently, lots of people had no idea who she was. Now she’s the talk of the town and, though it’s clearly time to share nicely, it’s hard not to think, “I loved her first!”
The 25 year old actress has blue eyes bigger than Tweetie Pie’s, but there’s not a cartoonish bone in her body. Gob-smackingly versatile in iconic TV shows (a multi-layered bitch in The White Lotus; an angsty cheerleader in Euphoria) she surpasses herself in the summer’s must-see movie, a portrait of a young whistle-blower based on an FBI transcript, but which often plays like a black comedy written by Chris Morris or Tina Fey.
In 2017, a woman called Reality Winner (yes, really) was working as a NSA translator and found herself being interviewed by the FBI at her rented bungalow in Georgia.
The FBI want to know if Reality is behind the leaking of a classified document, one that proves Russian hackers attempted to interfere with the 2016 US elections in Trump’s favour.
Courteous agents Taylor and Garrick (Marchant Davis and Josh Hamilton; superbly screw-ball) carry guns. So do their colleagues (all male), who swarm over the property, throwing Reality’s rescue dog into a panic. Reality is agonisingly polite and uses humour, whenever she can, to appease/win over these officials. Soon she and they are discussing CrossFit injuries, the colour of her AR-15 gun (“Is it pink?” yelps an excited Garrick, “I knew it would be!”), the direness of Georgia’s dating scene and fact that Reality’s dog and cat don’t like men.
Who says reality is boring? As already mentioned, everything that’s said is a recreation of the actual encounter, which the FBI recorded. This is nothing but the truth, except when it’s been redacted (“glitches” alert us to government-enforced omissions, high-lighting how hot this material remains).
Thanks to the transcript, director Tina Satter (adapting her own verbatim play, Is This A Room) has been gifted the perfect angle on a ton of problems that continue to bedevil the world (first and foremost, the Russian government’s contempt for democracy). Yet, by concentrating on Sweeney’s stricken face, Satter avoids seeming too political.
At the end, when the title “REALITY” flashes up on screen, the letters are the same shade of hot pink as Winner’s aforementioned gun. That defiantly frivolous detail captures the mood of an art-house experiment that wants to attract all kinds of viewers, not just the usual (liberal) suspects. Sweeney’s on a roll, in the reality check of the year.
In cinemas
83mins, cert 12A
