Within three months time, Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour went from a movie no one heard of to one everyone can’t stop bringing up. This is particularly so in the Oscar race, where it seems a shoe-in for Best Documentary, and for good reason. For her film — a two-fold examination on our national, and global, security and character study on Edward Snowden — is just as riveting, illuminating and urgent as people make it.
Self-titled the third part of Poitras’ America post 9/11 documentary series, Citizenfour is a fascinatingly well-research piece of documentary journalism; one encompassed with an unprecedented sense of urgency and paralleled danger. While Poitras’ film ultimately is a large-scale door opener akin to Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, the intimacy she experiences with Snowden — who is just on the brink of media frenzy when the movie introduces him — is what makes it so compelling.
A man who actually contacted her and fellow investigative journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill through encrypted e-mails before his whistleblowing, Snowden is seen as an engagingly frank, candid person, who — even when the s**t hits the fan — keeps composure and a sense of humor. Poitras, either intentionally or by coincidence, parallels the subject’s upfront, taunt persona, enabling her film to envision itself within its revolutionary mindset. She creates a film filled with consequence, but whose overriding desire to let people know their daily injustices in this digital day-and-age compels them to move forward.
Sternly focused, yet resiliently observant, Citizenfour feels like an invitation to an unseen backstage door behind breaking investigative reporting, even for journalists. While its pace can disarmingly drag at times, especially when it focuses on talking heads repeating the same notions of invasion of privacy, the engrossing and shocking access Poitras has into its subject’s life during this time constantly astounds and invigorates.
It’s made all the better by the fact that Poitras, save for one scene in the third quarter, never gets overly preachy about her message and stance on the matter, just letting her subjects and the facts speak for themselves. Citizenfour feels so record-breaking and invasive in its research that the audience can’t help but feel on the edge of their seats, waiting for the government to break down the doors and drag them to a detention center off the coast. This heightened sense of immediacy is key to the movie’s chillingly resistant closed-door feel, and what makes the documentary such a vital exploration of filmmaking.
Sometime in the near future, Oliver Stone will once again bring Snowden’s story to the big screen with his next untitled feature. Playing the prolific headline superstar will be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a choice solidified by Citizenfour’s focus of Edward as a good-hearted, personable man. Whether or not that movie is needed, though, is questionable, especially considering how revealing Citizenfour is of this real life figure. While there’s a valid argument to be made as to how biased this depiction of Snowden ultimately is, there’s no denying how hauntingly eye-opening this documentary is as the final credits roll.
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