2024 Sundance Film Festival Movie Review: Winner
In my review last year of Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla, I wrote briefly about movies with similar subjects coming out within a year of each other, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, Elvis and Priscilla, and the list goes on. We’ve just done that again in the forms of Reality and Winner, two films that look at NSA whistleblower Reality Winner (her actual name) who leaked government documents in 2017 showing Russia’s involvement in the 2016 Presidential election.
Reality, which came out in 2023 and stars Sydney Sweeney as Reality, is a more serious approach to the film and focuses mostly on the court case and Reality’s prison sentence. Winner, directed by Susana Fogel and starring Emilia Jones as Reality, takes a biopic approach to tell this story and looks more at Winner’s life, who she was growing up, and everything that led to these events. The result is a serviceable, breezy film.
Winner starts with Reality in high school. Her mother (Connie Britton) works while her father (Zach Galifianakis) is a writer who spends most of his time at home due to a lack of ideas and a back injury. Reality also has a sister (Kathryn Newton) who is the opposite of her. Reality is a hard worker and always looking to help and fight for her rights as an American.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Reality enlists in the Air Force with hopes of going to Afghanistan. That doesn’t happen and instead, she does intelligence surveillance, listening for any suspicious phone calls in Iraq and Afghanistan and helping take out potential targets. This does a number on Reality mentally due to the moral quandary she faces with each U.S. bombing that happened because of her intel. She gets through this by doing extreme workouts and attempting a dating life, which doesn’t work out due to her focus on herself and what she wants to work on.
Reality eventually gets a job working for the NSA, where she discovers documents showing Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. Always trying to do the right thing and knowing her rights as an American, Reality leaks the document to the press, which sets off a storm of controversy around Reality and the rights of Americans.
Emilia Jones gives a wonderful performance as Reality. Having broken out in 2021’s Best Picture winner CODA, Jones has steadily seen her star rise over the last few with the films she has starred in. She reteams with Fogle following 2023’s Cat Person, another Sundance film, and gives an impressive performance that carries the entire film. Jones is funny, captivating, and empathetic as Reality. We are always on her side through everything she does and understand her emotions, like the guilt she feels about listening to a call that leads to a bombing to the internal battle of doing her job versus doing what she believes is best for America. Jones’s excellent performance keeps Winner on track and interesting, even when the rest of the film isn’t.
Beyond Jones’s performance, the rest of the film gets put on the back burner. The supporting cast of talented actors felt ignored and one-note. Britton gets the most to do, but she doesn’t show up until the film’s final act. Galifianakis has brief scenes that highlight how good of an actor he can be in the writing role, but he has very thin characterization and there isn’t much to him despite being interesting. The rest of the characters are paper thin, which is disappointing because I felt like there was more to explore with Reality’s sister (played by the always reliable Kathryn Newton) that would have added more emotion to the film.
Winner is an easy, interesting telling of a wild American story that rests on the tremendous performance by Emilia Jones.
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