Early in Citizenfour – journalist Laura Poitras’ new film about whistleblower Edward Snowden – Snowden explains his internal struggle over whether to out himself as the source of the evidence for broad NSA spying on American citizens.
Snowden thinks it’s much more powerful for someone to openly leak information about wrongdoing than to do so anonymously – it sends the message to government officials that they’re the wrongdoers, not the whistleblower. However, he is also leery of the media’s tendency to focus on personalities at the expense of factual analysis. He wants the information he’s leaking to be the story, not himself.
Citizenfour tries to straddle the line Snowden identifies.
It’s in large part a drama about Snowden and the journalists he chooses to confide in – namely, Glenn Greenwald and Poitras herself, though the latter is hidden behind the camera. As such, it can’t help but be a portrait of these individuals. Indeed, the movie doesn’t try to avoid this, employing lingering close-ups of Snowden staring out the window of his hotel room.
At the same time, it’s a summary and dramatization of the story Snowden broke and selected events connected to it. Ultimately, however, the portraiture takes an upper hand, at the expense of more nuanced reporting.