Winner (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Winner is a brilliant young misfit from Texas who finds her morals challenged while serving in the U.S. Air Force and working as an NSA contractor.

My Take – Last year saw HBO Films release ‘Reality’, a tense and effective thriller, starring Sydney Sweeney, which used FBI transcriptions recorded on the day of her arrest to introduce us to Reality Winner, who printed and leaked a document from the National Security Agency’s database.

A document that revealed proof of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and later saw the publication called The Intercept, put out a call for evidence of Russian interference.

However, this latest from writer-director Susanna Fogel (Cat Person) takes a different approach to Reality Winner‘s story and the controversial political situations surrounding her to create a lighter & brighter decent coming-of-age drama.

Avoiding the usual, highly serious cloak and dagger tradition of whistleblower films, the screenplay, co-written by journalist and debut scriptwriter Kerry Howley (who penned the 2017 New York Magazine article on which the film is based), takes a comedy-inflected and personality-driven take on Winner’s life.

Sure, this approach might make it a challenging sell, with more serious audiences considering it too lightweight, but the final product is an engaging watch despite its shortcomings, offering enough to make it worth your time.

Beginning with the polarizing press take that surrounded her arrest back in 2017, which painted her in broad strokes as either a hero or a traitor, the story follows Reality Winner (Emilia Jones), a spunky blonde Texan from a middle-class family who from an early age is a staunchly humanitarian figure who wanted to dedicate her life to the service of others. The young maverick’s enlightenment about justice and oppression came from her father, Ron (Zach Galifianakis), a writer and stay-at-home dad.

While Reality’s mother Billie (Connie Britton) went off to work as a social worker, her father would expound on world issues. Their conversations inspired Reality to learn more about the relationship between the United States and countries in the Middle East. She even taught herself Arabic in high school and argued against racism and stereotyping.

Later, finding herself convinced by eager recruiters she joins the Air Force, believing it would help her fulfil her dream of traveling, eventually landing in the Middle East or Afghanistan. But she never makes it overseas. After basic training and learning various dialects, including Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, she joins the RAF, where her translation skills save hundreds of lives from terrorist bomb plots.

Though she gets herself a boyfriend Andre (Danny Ramirez) and watches her sister Brittany (Kathryn Newton) get married. The moral implications of her job mounts her physically and psychologically, eventually causing her to move to the NSA, where she gets access to a dozen classified files. But it is that one particular print out that she makes that allows the government to make an example of her.

Here, the film takes a wider view, barreling through definitive scenes of Reality’s life from childhood through her four-year prison sentence, explaining the how and why behind her political act that even she ruefully acknowledges didn’t make people care.

Though we get moments of fleeting tension like when Reality sneaks the documents out of her office and later when the FBI interrogates her in her home. But, for the most part, the film is married to a quirky tone. It’s committed to showing us how Reality is, in the words of her own character, “not a normal girl.”

We see Fogel‘s direction strikes a curious balance between comedy and drama, offering a somewhat unconventional portrayal of a person whose life was shaped by an act of defiance. Unlike the Tina Satter directorial, the Reality we meet in this film is quick-witted, sarcastic, brutally honest, and thoroughly convinced of her own righteousness; a portrayal that’s based on co-writer Kerry Howley’s interviews with her, both for this film and the article upon which it was based.

But where this characterization might come off as quirky and relatable, it also risks reducing the weight of her real-life decisions, glossing over the severity of the consequences she faced. Nevertheless, despite its buoyant tone, the film doesn’t shy away from the larger themes like patriotism, moral integrity, and the conflict between personal beliefs and institutional loyalty.

Performance wise, Emilia Jones holds her own, doing enough to justify her talent. But her performance pales in comparison to Sweeney’s more complex portrayal. Although she nails the comedic beats, her shift to more serious stuff in the second half of the film is more of a mixed bag.

In supporting roles, Zach Galifinakis is a standout, while Connie Britton is magnificent as always. Danny Ramirez and Kathryn Newton manage to be likable despite being underused. On the whole, ‘Winner’ is a decent biopic that offers a fresh look at a young woman whose life was forever altered by her refusal to remain silent.