New movie review: Citizenfour

Edward Snowden (left) speaks with journalist Glenn Greenwald in Citizenfour.

Every breath you take

Every move you make

Every bond you break

Every step you take

I’ll be watching you

– “Every Breath You Take,” by The Police

Every time you write. Every message you type. Every post you like. Everything you write. They are watching you. An accurate message, fittingly originated by The Police, translated to 2014, when it is no longer just a vaguely creepy wedding song but a disturbing reality of life in the digital age. The whole world is online, and whoever you are on the Internet, for all intents and purposes, is who you are.

When you click on a link or visit a site, you are logging information about who you are, who you will be, and who you wish you were. To have access to that information would be to have power – the ability to control all the versions of you that exist. We already know this on some intuitive level, and it is the tradeoff we make to enjoy the convenience of the online world.

Of course Google knows everything for which we have ever searched. Of course dating websites know intimate details about the ways we love. Of course Facebook is an experiment in culture on a scale the likes of which social scientists could never have dreamed. These are acceptable risks. We bury them and move on. But, where is the line?

We now know that the U.S. government and the National Security Agency in particular have had access to all of it – our phones, our computers, our lives – since at least Sept. 11, 2001. Out of fear, we agreed to allow those who protect us nearly unlimited power to find the monsters, but instead of checking for bogeymen under the bed, they were lifting our covers to see if we were the threat. If we cannot draw a line there, then maybe we do not believe in lines.

The new documentary from Laura Poitras, Citizenfour, explores the extent of the government’s spy programs through the eyes of the man who brought it all to light – Edward Snowden. He is infamous now. Snowden is a traitor, a hero, a pariah, a patriot. He is the man we saw dissected on the news while the real story passed by us. He is the beating heart at the center of Poitras’ dense political thriller, which tells a story that would be implausible if we did not already know that it is true.

Poitras is the director behind two great Iraq War documentaries, the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country and The Oath, which landed her on the government’s watchlist. She moved to Berlin and began work on a film about American surveillance programs. Then, she began receiving the emails. Cryptic, mostly coded messages with the promise of blowing the lid off U.S. post-9/11 spying, they were signed “Citizenfour.” Snowden was contacting her.

Working through the paranoia and around the surveillance under which they would both live, Poitras and Snowden met in Hong Kong. For more than a week, they sat in a hotel room, and she filmed Snowden covering everything from his past and his hopes for the future to the staggering scope of the U.S. government’s intrusion into citizens’ lives.

These interviews make up the bulk of the film’s runtime, but rather than bogging down the proceedings as talking-head sequences so often do, they play as the riveting confessionals of an unknown man who knows he is about to become public enemy No. 1. Sitting in with Poitras are the journalists who would get credit for breaking one of the biggest stories of our time. They are Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill.

Snowden is clearly putting himself and his family at tremendous risk by releasing his privileged information, but so are those documenting his journey and telling his story. As a journalist, it is hard not to sit in awe of the murderer’s row of investigative reporters assembled for this movie. For me, this is what the best reporting is about: digging deeper than anyone has cared to look and uncovering the things no one wanted to see.

Greenwald is a particularly impressive man, whom Snowden recommended Poitras bring on board. Dedicated to comprehending the full weight of what Snowden is revealing, Greenwald becomes a stand-in for the audience – as any good journalist should. Snowden has lived with these facts of life for a long time, but these revelations are mostly new to Greenwald and to us. His shock is our shock.

Your viewing of this film and your ultimate feelings toward it will probably depend on what you think of Snowden and his actions. Poitras knows this, and despite her subject’s protestations that he is not the story, she goes to great lengths to put Snowden’s whistleblowing in the context of his own life and struggles as much as the world at large.

Indeed, some of the film’s most powerful images are of Snowden sitting in his hotel room and watching the fallout of what we now call the “NSA leak.” More powerful still are the silent moments of Snowden staring out the window of his room. Here is a man who has brought the whole world down on himself. When he stares at an adjacent building, every window on every floor poses a threat, as do each passing car and every unknown face. Paranoia is a life sentence.

At the end of the day, though, this film is not about Snowden or Greenwald or Poitras. It is about all of us. The end of privacy is the end of liberty. Consider the Arab Spring of a few years back. Using the social media tools at their disposal to organize, they gathered in the streets and gave a voice to an opposition movement so long forced underground and into silence. The world watched. The government’s response was to shut down the Internet to try to prevent future demonstrations.

It would be hard to invent two more diametrically opposed ideologies: the people freely exchanging ideas and exercising their right to gather and a brutal, dictatorial regime trying to deny the rights of those people. Some have suggested such things could never happen here, and to an extent, they are right. But, the final question of Citizenfour is: If the U.S. government knows where you gather, who was with you, and what you said, is it any better?

The first one through the wall always gets bloody, but Snowden did what he did because this is not the America he signed up to protect. His hope is that others will follow him through the wall. Liberal, conservative, or independent, when the elected no longer bow to the will of the voters, that is a government that has outlived its usefulness. Maybe, despite this, you still think the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you think American exceptionalism is a crumbling myth. Either way, we should all be better than this.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Life Itself

At 22, I landed my first professional newspaper job. Just six weeks out of college, I was hired to write sports and community news for a mid-size daily newspaper in a secluded Northern California county. It was a dream job, the vocation for which I had studied, for which I had strived, and toward which I had been pointed more or less my entire life. I was going to be a professional writer.

Still, classrooms, books, and teachers can only prepare you so much and cannot prepare you for what it is like to put yourself out in the public sphere, to be vulnerable, and to open yourself to the world. That is when the phone calls and emails started – vitriol directed at me because at whom else would it be directed. I was the man at the desk.

My editor, who had taken a chance in hiring me and to whom I remain grateful to this day, assured me it was nothing I had done. He urged me not to take it personally and to remember this is just the way it is. He had been the man on the Sports desk for 10 years before I got there, so he knew a thing or two about being the target of unchanneled rage.

But he had nearly two decades in the business on me. I was still green and less capable of accepting this as part of the job. It must have been me and something I had done. I had only been there three months, and already, I was wondering if I was in the right profession. Had I made a terrible mistake?

It was around this time, May 2011, that Roger Ebert wrote about Thor. Ebert would, on numerous occasions since he dove head first into the Internet, write something that stuck in people’s craw. He wrote about everything – gun violence, religion, evolution, etc., all topics bound to generate intelligent debate and childish name-calling in equal measure.

What Ebert wrote about best, however, were movies, and on this occasion, his review of Thor had so riled the fanboys he felt the need to write a blog post in response. On May 15, 2011, he posted “My mighty hammering over ‘Thor.’” With his usual sharp wit and deadly logic, he addressed his critics head on while still providing a forum for their criticisms – the comments section. Ebert was famous on his blog for personally vetting each comment, publishing it to the site, and responding when he felt it was warranted.

This confluence of events – the criticisms lobbed at him over Thor and my new-found since of dread every time the phone at my desk rang – led me to post a comment. I am not, by nature, a commenter. I read. I consider. I prefer discussion. But in this instance, I felt a need to comment. If you scroll down at that link I provided, you can see my comment. It is essentially what I have explained above, but it was also a thank you to Ebert.

I wanted to thank him for continuing to put himself out there, and I wanted to say to him, from one journalist at the beginning of his career to another approaching what would prove to be the tail end of his, I appreciated his work and the platform for discussion he provided. Ebert published the comment with this addendum:

“Ebert: If they always like you, you’re doing something wrong.”

He had responded to me. Nine words, and I felt as though I had won the lottery. Such was the impact of Ebert, and that power is what lies at the heart of Steve James’ wonderful new documentary, Life Itself.

Based in large part on Ebert’s 2012 memoir of the same name, the film tells the story of an old-school newspaperman who became one of the most influential voices the medium had ever known. A Pulitzer Prize winner who proved serious film criticism is also serious journalism, he used all the media at his disposal to bring real, thought-provoking discussion into as many homes as he could, starting with newspapers, through his television show with Gene Siskel, and eventually on the Internet.

James is the director of such Ebert-championed documentaries as The Interrupters and the masterpiece Hoop Dreams, and as his filmography suggests, he has a knack for taking broad, all-encompassing topics and breaking them down in a digestible fashion without pandering or selling his subjects short.

Here, he has the unenviable task of doing the same with the whole of one man’s fascinating life. James handles the assignment with aplomb, structuring the film around the four phases of Ebert’s private and professional life – his early career at the Daily Illini and the Chicago Sun-Times, his and Siskel’s television show, his life with wife Chaz Ebert, and his death.

Each section is revealing of a different aspect of who Ebert was. He was a brilliant storyteller who was often the life of the party. He was a prideful and ornery co-worker who butted heads with his equally strident and intelligent co-host. He was a generous family man who discovered later in life that love truly could be a guiding force. And he was a cancer survivor and eventually victim who took his disease and turned it into what he called “the third act” of his life.

The film paints stunning portraits of each of these men and shows how they were all derived from the same complex, flawed, and brilliant individual.

There are interviews with his fellow journalists, his old bar chums, and the filmmakers he critiqued and sometimes befriended. These are fascinating documents and will appeal to anyone passionate about film, journalism, or the journeys we all take in life. But the real hero of this piece is Chaz Ebert.

She comes across as a strong-willed, patient, caring, beautiful, and smart woman who knows one thing above all else: She loves this man. And he loved her. Ebert wrote at length about the joy his wife brought him, that without her, the loneliness and darkness would have consumed him. When Chaz Ebert speaks, you see in full the woman who could have that effect.

Most of all, it is seen in the couple’s interactions as the disease chips away at who Ebert was – a man of voracious appetites who could no longer eat or drink; a gifted storyteller who could no longer speak; a grandfather whose walks with his grandchildren brought immense pleasure into a once-empty life who could no longer ascend the stairs of his home. She is by his side every moment. She is the lighthouse guiding him safely into harbor and into whatever lies ahead.

Their great fortune and ours is that his mind remained sharp and his passion for writing endured until his final hours. In his last years, after the cancer had come and gone and come again, he produced more than many of us will in our entire lives. His life was a joyous one, and the sadness is ours that he will produce no more, that we live in a world in which Roger Ebert has written his last words.

See it? Yes.