"Reality (2023)" - Film Review
Most know Sydney Sweeney from her often-memed role as Cassie in HBO’s Euphoria. It’s a role filled with teenage sex, drugs, and drama, all highly stylized and glossy. Or maybe you recognize her from the first season of The White Lotus, where she played one of the snarky twenty-somethings reading books by the pool. Sweeney’s breakout roles are glamorous and sardonic, inadvertently pigeonholing her into a type, but those with an astute eye have long known Sweeney is the real deal. For the nonbelievers, Reality solidifies Sweeney’s place in the conversation of next-gen Hollywood.
Courtesy of HBO
Reality Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, for mailing an NSA document about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election to an online news site. She was sentenced to five years and three months of prison time, the longest sentence ever given to someone for leaking classified documents. Reality covers the events of the day of the arrest. Reality (Sweeney) comes home from grocery shopping to find two FBI agents (Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton) at her home. What transpires over the next 83 minutes is a taut political thriller that unfolds on a personal level.
When it comes to adapting a true story, there’s always a question of how much was modified for the sake of creating a motion picture. Which creative liberties were taken to make the movie more exciting. These modifications can change the integrity of the person whose story is supposed to be honored. In the case of Reality, as the name would imply, the filmmakers have fully bound themselves to the true events of that day. The entirety of the dialogue comes from recordings made by the FBI. Every “uh,” “um,” dog bark, and cough actually happened. Reality exists solely on the day of Reality’s arrest, so there’s no room for filling in the blanks in a way that’s fudging the truth. There are a few dialogue-less scenes where we see Reality at work, but these snippets are all corroborated by the FBI recording. One of the only differences, if not the only difference, is that Agent Taylor is not Black as he is portrayed in the film.
Courtesy of HBO
The film is based on a play called Is This a Room, and those roots are evident in the staging. Transferring the story to film does allow director/co-writer Tina Satter (who also wrote the play) to get creative with audio distortion effects and managing sections of the FBI recordings that are redacted. Reality is harrowing because Satter places us firmly in Reality’s shoes. While the events aren’t exactly playing out in real time, the film gives the illusion that they are, and the result is uncomfortable. It feels as though the audience is enduring questioning by the FBI and experiencing the effects of being cornered. It’s uncomfortable but necessary viewing about a not-too-distant time in our lives.
More than a compelling narrative film, Reality shows that it’s entirely possible to maintain the reality of a situation without compromising the cinematic possibilities. Reality understands that truth always trumps fiction.
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