'Winner' Review - Emilia Jones Takes on America in Reality Winner Biopic

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Last year saw the release of Reality, Tina Satter’s excellent look at the arrest of Reality Winner—which utilized the FBI’s interrogation transcript to tell the story of Winner’s questioning about whether she leaked a classified document. Reality was a tense film, with a great performance by Sydney Sweeney, about an Air Force veteran who felt that Americans needed to know the truth about their country and how much it cost her in the long run. Winner’s story is a powerful reminder of people who put themselves at risk simply to do the right thing.

How Does 'Winner' Handle This Story?

That being said, Reality Winner’s story is an extremely odd story to turn into a comedy, but that’s what Winner—the latest film from Cat Person’s Susanna Fogel—attempts to do. But from the moment that Winner begins, with a narration by Emilia Jones’ take on Reality Winner, it’s clear this is a misguided approach. She liberally drops “y’all” in as much as possible, making fun of her strange name, with a sense of humor that isn’t nearly as funny as the movie thinks it is. There’s nothing wrong with two very different approaches to the same story, but y’all, this ain’t it.

While Reality focused on one specific period of Winner’s life, Winner goes much further back, showing her interest in learning new languages at a young age, her period in the Air Force, her relationships, and her eventual work as an NSA contractor. The screenplay by Fogel and Kerry Howley shows her frustration with the government that continued to build over the years, even though that doesn’t seem to have much of anything to do at all with Winner’s decision to leak a document about Russia’s interference in the U.S. election. Winner wants us to know more about where Reality Winner came from and the past that led up to this important moment in her life, but this buildup feels entirely irrelevant to where the story is headed.

'Winner' Doesn't Have Much of an Arc

In showing Winner’s life, there isn’t much of a story to explore. Winner begins with her arrest and her narration stating that she was just trying to tell us the government was lying to us. Yet Winner’s dramatic arc goes from actively distrusting the government in her very first scene to…still distrusting the government in the final scene. Throughout the film, we’re given several examples of why she has had issues with the U.S. government, but again, none of that does much for where her story leads, other than that she should’ve been well aware that her government was going to lie to her over and over again. It seems like every time she’s let down by the government, it comes as a shock to her.

Fogel and Howley also include a useless and exhausting narration that winks at the audience and attempts to keep this story lighthearted. However, the jokes are weak—bordering on, “Well, THAT just happened!” levels of depth—and do nothing but tell us things that we can easily see on our own. And while it’s unfair to compare Reality and Winner, this version does feel like it’s building up to a story we’ve seen told better before, which makes the eventual arrest scene not bring the fear and tension that it needs to have. Taking such a dramatic story and turning it into a comedy isn’t an easy prospect, regardless of how funny the filmmakers find the real person, but it needs to have a bit more punch in its humor than Winner has—a tired collection of eye-roll-worthy jokes that only hurt the larger story.

'Winner' Is At Its Best After the Arrest

While this expansion of Winner’s story doesn’t always work, it at least gives us some decent supporting performances, as we learn more about her family. Zach Galifianakis as Reality’s father Ronald shows us where Reality’s fight for what’s right comes from, in a performance that nicely shows Galifianakis’ gifts as a dramatic actor. Meanwhile, Kathyrn Newton, as Reality’s sister Brittany, presents the impact that Reality’s actions had on her family, and how the family supported her choices. Jones is also capable as Winner, but it’s the screenplay that doesn’t do her any favors.

Winner also at least makes the post-arrest details interesting, as we see how much of an impact it had on Winner’s family, and the lack of an impact it had on the rest of the world. For such a major choice to be made, the letdown of the reaction it actually gets is a tragedy in and of itself, which makes this post-script arguably the most effective part of the entire film.

Between Winner and last year’s Cat Person, Fogel has taken on ambitious projects, without quite nailing the tone of what these stories need to be. Cat Person was an awkward romance mixed with comedy that went off the rails once the film diverted from the original story. Winner is an even bigger mess throughout, as it never presents a solid reason why we needed a backstory for Reality Winner, nor any reason to think that a more comedic take on this concept needed to be made. The best parts of Winner come post-arrest, and strangely, those are also the most dramatic elements of the film—a testament to how this lighter approach might’ve been a mistake. It’s a shame, considering that as a co-writer on Booksmart, we saw how Fogel could capture a difficult idea—a caring, hilarious high school comedy about two best friends who love each other—and make it work. But that attentiveness to tone and what the story needs just isn’t there in Winner.

Winner is a bold idea that almost immediately proves itself to be a misconceived mess. As a comedy, Winner is wholeheartedly misguided, but when it allows itself moments of drama, it begins to somewhat work. Winner could’ve been an interesting project, but both Cat Person and now this film proves that Fogel might not have been up to the daunting task.

Winner is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

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