A man who's willing to reveal the breadth of the U.S. government's surveillance program sits holed up in a hotel room, nervously telling his story to a reporter he thinks he can trust. His paranoia is infectious, and every unexpected sound makes it seem like Big Brother is ready to swoop in and detain him. Moviegoers have watched this scene in innumerable thrillers, but Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour, which focuses on NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, shows us what that sequence looks like when it transpires in real life.
As the movie opens, Poitras reads anonymous emails from someone who claims to have proof of the unprecedented scope of the U.S. government's spying on American citizens and people in foreign countries. They send encrypted messages back and forth and eventually meet in a Hong Kong hotel room, along with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. Over the course of a week, Snowden familiarizes them with the wealth of documentation he copied from his work at the NSA.
However, as Greenwald's stories begin to go public, Snowden must find a way to get out of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Poitras, Greenwald, and other reporters feel the surveillance on them increasing to an uncomfortable degree.
Citizenfour's greatest accomplishment is that it leaves viewers with the same feeling as the best conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor). Yet the movie it shares the most DNA with is All the President's Men -- a fact so obvious that the film smartly name-checks Alan J. Pakula's Watergate docudrama. During the first 30 minutes, before we ever see Snowden, Poitras shoots scenes with a cinematic flair. This isn't your typical grainy, handheld, cinéma vérité footage; the images are usually composed just slightly off-center, and, along with the anxiety-producing score by Trent Reznor, they instill and maintain an overwhelming sense of unease in the viewer.
This setup is so effective that the film suffers just a bit from being visually static when we spend a long period of time inside the hotel room. The discussions in these scenes are enthralling, however, and Snowden himself is a compelling figure -- calmly resolute, but still on edge. He seems reasonable, and uninterested in publicizing himself; he just wants to get this information out to the public at large. Snowden often states that he wants a public debate about America's surveillance tactics and the willingness with which phone companies and Internet providers share their records with government agencies. If nothing else, Citizenfour will certainly help start that conversation.
Although Michael Moore's successes helped spawn a whole movement of advocacy documentaries, Poitras has crafted a film that isn't interested in pushing a particular ideology, despite its highly political subject matter. The movie wants to get this information out to the public, as well as elucidate how modern technology makes it difficult to report on potential governmental abuses (since digital communication and banking make it easy for anyone in the world to be tracked by those ordered to watch over them). The documentary works as an ode to fearless investigative journalists.
Despite all its paranoia, the movie does hold out a glimmer of optimism. After all, as difficult as it was for Snowden, he managed to pull off this security leak. Just as importantly, Poitras, an American who lives in Germany, managed to get this movie made and released in her home country. That accomplishment is a tribute to the First Amendment, as well as proof that no matter how much the government knows about us, it's still possible to shine the light of truth on those in power who try to hide their actions.