Documentary about Assange is a ‘Risk’ with low payoff
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an enigma, a globe-trotting firebrand who speaks like a Lutheran minister on Valium.
Is he a crusading idealist or a narcissistic opportunist? A genius revolutionary poised to tear down the global order, or a stooge of the Russians? A martyr or a rapist?
“Risk,” the new documentary on Assange by Laura Poitras, answers none of these questions, and only really asks them in a roundabout, fly-onthe-wall sort of way. It exists not to demystify Assange but to highlight the mystery, a fluorescent markup on a text you’ve already read.
Or at least it seems to assume you have.
Poitras has probed the battle lines between national security and global hacktivism in previous work, including the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour,” about Edward Snowden. For “Risk,” she began filming in 2011, shortly after Assange made international headlines by publishing U.S. military logs and videos leaked by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning.
The cameras capture Assange — or fail to, really — in strategy meetings, on an urgent call to the State Department and, most dramatically, as he gingerly inserts colored contact lenses to complete his disguise before slipping away to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to evade extradition to Sweden to answer sexualassault allegations. (He remains there today.)
Superimposed text marks headlines over the years, but “Risk” provides little background or context. Occasionally Poitras inserts herself with a brief voiceover, including one that notes that while she once tried to ignore the contradictions she