You know Reality Winner? The young translator who was working as an NSA contractor and got busted for leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election? She got sick of hearing Glenn Greenwald in particular say it was a hoax when she had proof sitting right there, so she mailed it to The Intercept, who published unredacted scans of the documents, “accidentally” leading the feds to the exact printer they came out of. She pled guilty and was sentenced to 5 years and 3 months in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917, the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to the media.

I always thought it was an intriguing story because it seemed like such a foolish thing for somebody to do, but also sorta relatable, and of course you did a double take when you read her name. What was up with her? I got why they had to prosecute her, but it really seemed like she got a raw deal, even moreso in retrospect. The very guy who benefited from the Russian interference (and who ignored her pleas for clemency) later stole a literal truck load of secret documents, dumped them around his shit-ass country club like half-eaten pizzas in an ‘80s movie cop’s apartment, then committed numerous other serious crimes in the cover up of that crime. Winner served about four years, Trump was able to slow walk his with his own judge, have it dismissed and then fire the FBI agents assigned to (unsuccessfully) investigate him – this seems like an imbalance to me. They should at least fly Reality Winner to DC and give her one running kick to his nuts wearing a cement boot. Or she could outsource it to a Make a Wish Foundation kid if she chooses. I think something like that would be good for the country.

Anyway I was intrigued when I came across the 2024 movie WINNER on Hulu and realized it was a biopic of Reality Winner. (Tagline: “based on reality.”) The thumbnail looks more like a quirky indie comedy, and that’s kind of what it is. Instead of doing it as a big dramatic whistleblower thriller it’s Reality Winner (Emilia Jones, star of CODA) telling you the story like you’re a friend who gets her sense of humor. It has all kinds of drama and it got me emotional about family stuff but also it knows this is a colorful character and a wild story and it’s more effective to have fun with it than be self-important.

Reality (often called Rea by her family) narrates the story to us, beginning when she was 9 (played by Annelise Pollmann). Her mother Billie (Connie Britton, AMERICAN ULTRA) is a social worker, but her father Ron (Zach Galifianakis, OPERATION: ENDGAME), a writer on disability, is the one who really influences her world view. (Also the one who named her.) He’s a kill-your-television bumper sticker type who can’t help but tell his kids the truth about puppy mills, factory farms, police states and shit. When he explains 9-11 to her it makes her want to learn languages like Pashto and Arabic to understand other perspectives.

The prosecutors used her interest in those languages against her in court, as evidence of terrorist sympathies. But long before that it got her into the Air Force. While in high school she tells off a military recruiter (Kristian Jordan) but he’s impressed by her, and she’s later convinced that her skills could help save innocent people in Afghanistan. She hopes to be sent there but finds herself stateside in an office full of people on headsets like telemarketers, translating wiretaps and dispatching information used for drone strikes. She’s very good at it, but feels tremendously guilty, even when it seems to be the right thing.

She tries to exorcise her demons by obsessively working out, and falls in love with a charming man-bunned bartender named Andre (Danny Ramirez, TOP GUN: MAVERICK) who recognizes her from the gym. Important note: I noticed Andre wearing an MF DOOM sweatshirt, and Reality wearing a Ching02 tank top. I wonder if this is something they learned in research, that Reality has refined hip hop tastes? (She also has merch for bands I wouldn’t know about, like I think Rancid? These ones caught my eye.)

Reality doesn’t really fit into an easy box. She’s vegan, worries about climate change, has an anti-authority/peacenik side to her, but also loves shooting guns and believes in her mission to fight terrorists. Like any reasonable American she has both pride and shame in aspects of her country. Some people (like her brother-in-law, played by Sam Duke) can’t handle her, and she has trouble finding people to relate to living in small military towns. It really shakes her when she realizes her best friend from work (Shannon Berry) isn’t bothered by watching people get blown up on live feeds like she is.

Kathryn Newton, who I think is so funny in LISA FRANKENSTEIN, ABIGAIL and FREAKY, has more of a straight woman role here as Reality’s sister Brittany, who gets stuck between her weirdo sister and her stick-in-the-mud man. I think she finds Reality both inspiring and exhausting, which is how the whole family feels about Dad. Emphasis on the exhausting. He has a painkiller addiction and other problems that lead to a divorce, but Reality is very protective of him. It’s a good role for Galifianakis, using something like his regular comic persona as an obvious mask for pain and despair that he doesn’t want to burden his daughter with.

When she takes a higher paying job translating for the NSA she has to work with Fox News playing in the room at all times. There’s an irony there that she’s got the indoctrination box barking at her all day while the work she’s doing tells her how full of shit they are. It’s interesting that the production was allowed to use real Fox News clips. I noticed Pete Hegseth in one of them, at the time a dipshit morning talk show host, which is why he’s now Trump’s Secretary of Defense, and yet another high ranking buffoon not being punished in any way for his huge intelligence breaches.

Because we’ve gotten to know this character of Reality, a very talented and unique mind but also a regular person we could hang out and listen to MF DOOM with, it is some heavy duty shit when she decides to do this thing we know she’ll get busted for. She drops the envelope in a mailbox and you can sense her stomach knotting and her brain saying well, it’s done now, too late to turn back, nothing I can do but get the fuck out of here.

The way they depict it she keeps refreshing The Intercept for days, surprised they’re not posting about it, almost ready to forget about it and move on with her life when some cop-like dudes block her in as she comes home with groceries. She claims not to know what agents Garrick (Adam Hurtig, WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH) and Taylor (Arne MacPherson, WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS) are there for, but it turns out they already know everything.

She fucked up but it’s not immediately clear how much trouble she’s in. Her mom and sister believe, or want to believe, that the system will understand she’s a good person who meant well and this will be straightened out. Well, no.

When I was on a civil jury last year one of the lawyers kept trying to embarrass the witnesses by reading their text messages to co-workers about their boss being an idiot. I think it backfired – I wasn’t the only juror who thought resorting to such sleazy bullshit reflected not having anything of substance to argue. So it was interesting to see the same technique deployed successfully against a character whose sense of humor we’ve been familiar with throughout the movie. We feel so outraged on her behalf when these very serious people read her text messages and phone transcripts in court, pretending not to understand her jokes.

Unless you watch this having never heard of Reality Winner you know what happens in her case – no big moment of justice, just a family trying to stand up for her and raise awareness of her plight, without a huge payoff. So the arc is more about their relationships and her perseverance and how she comes out feeling about the whole thing in the end. But I found it very moving. It’s also what I like to call A Real Movie – it looks nice. I was excited to see on the credits that the d.p. was Steve Yedlin (TOOLBOX MURDERS, THE LAST JEDI).

WINNER is directed by Susanna Fogel (director of THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME and CAT PERSON, writer of BOOKSMART) and written by Kerry Howley based on her own New York Magazine article “Who Is Reality Winner?”, which I read afterwards. The movie is unsurprisingly fictionalized – the timeline of the divorce is changed for dramatic purposes, the nice boyfriend and the jerk brother-in-law are not in there, maybe invented or composites. But a recruiter really did zero in on her and take her out for a burger. The screens at her NSA contractor job really were set to Fox News, and she did file a formal complaint about it.

I’m surprised they left out that she liked to make paintings of herself, Nelson Mandela and Jesus, but they find ways to dramatize many of the other little details. A line in the article about her not being able to get a job at an NGO because “they want degrees to pass out blankets” becomes a whole job interview scene. A note that she wears unmatched socks is referenced by her folding two different colors of socks together while being interrogated in her laundry room.

I do wonder if Howley included other things from her research or things she learned later about Winner’s treatment in prison. The article was published in 2017, before the trial. I’ve had many experiences of reading the magazine article a movie was based on and thinking it ruined the story how much movie bullshit they felt they had to throw in there (ARGO and PAIN & GAIN come to mind). This is not one of those, and more importantly it does a good job of capturing the personalities of Reality, her mom and sister as described in the article, brilliantly played by Jones, Britton and Newton.

WINNER seems to have received mostly poor reviews, many complaining that the tone was not what you would expect for a movie about this topic, which is of course one of the things that’s good about it. Maybe I’ll strike out, but I’ll be recommending this to all kinds of people.

WINNER is such a perfect title for WINNER, it’s funny that there was already a 2023 Reality Winner movie that perfectly used the title REALITY. That one also came about because of “Who Is Reality Winner?” – the article caught the attention of playwright Tina Satter with its subhead “America’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread,” and then she clicked on its link to a PDF of the FBI interrogation transcript. She thought it read like a play, a thriller, so she staged it under the title Is This a Room off Broadway, then on Broadway, to much acclaim. Then she directed this movie version starring Sydney Sweeney (IMMACULATE) as Winner.

REALITY makes good back-to-back viewing with WINNER, because they’re both very good, but they couldn’t possibly be more tonally different, and they don’t feel very repetitive because REALITY is an 82 minute version of what’s basically one scene in WINNER. After a brief opening at the office (designed totally differently from the one in WINNER) it skips to Reality coming home on June 3, 2017 and being cornered in her driveway by agents serving a search warrant. So we spend the day with Reality as she tries to act cooperative but not confess to Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton, the dad in EIGHTH GRADE) and Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis, A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN).

I think what’s really compelling about it is not so much what it says about this particular case as just how using the transcript gives us an intimate view of something we’re used to seeing only in shorthand. It’s procedural in a way that’s both interesting and tension-building; we spend time with Reality delaying the inevitable, engaging in small talk on the lawn during the tedious negotiations of how to secure her dog, cat and guns, and verify no one else is in the house. Garrick makes polite conversation about dog ownership, her military career, the neighborhood, her side gig teaching crossfit. I really bought it as a genuine human moment. The agents have time to kill, she’s an interesting person, and maybe they feel sorry for her, or maybe they really compartmentalize their job enough that for now they can set the accusations aside and just treat her as a person. Or of course more likely it’s insincere, a strategy to gain her trust and later her confession. Regardless, it’s funny that when she mentions a powerlifting competition we see Taylor, who’s very muscular and wears an Under Armour polo shirt, immediately perk up and walk across the yard to join the conversation about how much she can lift.

After the house is cleared they agree to do the interview in a dusty back room with no furniture; she says something never followed up on about not using the room because it’s creepy, and she apologizes for how dirty it is. She keeps politely turning down offers to sit or have water, as if refusing amenities will make her seem more innocent. I like those odd details that would be shaved out of a more economical re-enactment. Another one is the title of the play, said by some random dude who pokes his head in for a second, apparently just now learning this is where the interview is happening.

I’ve been sold on Sweeney for a while now, but this might be her new best, or at least her best straight up dramatic performance. It’s so nerve-racking to know how this will turn out – that the Titanic is gonna hit the iceberg – but watch her try not to crack at first. She does some good lying for a while. Then some not so good lying. The agents are better at it than Reality.

It took me a second to figure out where I knew Hamilton from – he was a douchebag politician villain in the last seasons of The Walking Dead. He was good at that, but he’s great here, a convincing sorta dweeby boy scout guy, though that comes into question when he asks her if she needs something to drink so many times it somehow sounds like a threat, and moreso late in the game when he starts tightening the screws, revealing what he knows Reality has lied about and changing his tone to get her flustered.

There are some stylistic choices I didn’t like – documentary-style cuts to soundwaves to remind you there are recordings of this, blips where Reality disappears from actual reality during pieces of dialogue that are redacted in the transcript, even though by now we know what was said. These gimmicks come off as a lack of confidence in the movie’s greatest strength, which is its simplicity. I suspect they were worried that they had to break it up a little to keep our interest, but instead the cutaways risk breaking the spell. Luckily they don’t do it that much. The movie survives. This is a good one.

It’s interesting to compare REALITY’s verbatim depiction to the related material in WINNER. They make the interview more comical by setting it in a cramped laundry nook, and they portray Reality as kind of a defiant smartass rather than a nervous laugher. In retrospect, though, most or all of what they say in that scene is also in this, so it’s just a different (shorter and looser) way of interpreting the transcript.

REALITY being set at such a stressful time, obviously we get less of her quirky personality. But Satter managed to work in that Pikachu bed spread, plus evidence that she’s really into NAUSICAÄ.

Winner was in prison and then house arrest during the play’s runs, but she did talk to Satter “all summer” on the phone and Zoom. Satter really wanted her to come see the play, but would you want to if you were her? I don’t know, man. That might be stressful.

I don’t want to say that one of these is the best Reality Winner movie, because I thought they were both great in different ways. Neither Jones or Sweeney look much like Winner, but I really enjoyed both of their interpretations, with Jones giving her an odd smarter-than-her-surroundings discomfort, while Sweeney (depicting her in very specific circumstances) does more with her vulnerability.

REALITY doesn’t have as much to say about the case, because that’s not really what it’s about. It’s an experiential story. It’s about, okay, you heard she got interrogated, here’s an idea of what that looks like up close and personal, how it works, how she reacted. It happens to be a historic moment but it’s the humanity of it that the movie is concerned with.

WINNER has more of a thesis. It loves Reality’s eccentricity and intelligence, respects her being led by her conscience even if it just means “dying on a hill,” and by letting us get to know her as a person first it then really underlines how unfairly she was portrayed by the government and media. It also uses her as an audience surrogate into some of the inhumanity of our foreign policy and our justice system (though fictional Reality is quick to aim the spotlight toward what the other prisoners are going through).

They wanted to make an example out of Reality Winner, and they succeeded, but WINNER reclaims her spirit. Yeah, maybe try not to go to prison, it’s up to you, but don’t just be a drone. Believe in things, and take a stand for them when you can, don’t just go along with it. Be a Winner.

I highly recommend both of these movies. I watched them last name first (reverse release order), and that worked really well for me, but I’d be interested to hear how it plays the other way around.