WikiLeaks story lacks juicy villain
One of the staples of the modern thriller is that scene where a guy is typing at a computer and he has only a few seconds before the bomb goes off or the billions are transferred or his mom comes into the room and sees what’s on his screen.
The Fifth Estate, which is the story of WikiLeaks, is pretty much two hours of that scene, minus the mom.
It’s also the story of Julian Assange (the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch), the elusive, difficult and very blond founder of WikiLeaks, a man whose essential mystery is seen as a metaphor for what he does. His life is a secret, so he enjoys exposing them.
This is swell psychology, at least in Hollywood, but it makes for kind of dull moviemaking. Throw in an important subtext — the profound change in newsgathering and the ethical issues it has engendered — and it’s just about as boring as it sounds.
For one thing, it lacks a juicy villain.
All The President’s Men, a study of journalistic investigations from an era that seems quaint by comparison, had the great, glowering Richard Nixon at its core.
The Fifth Estate has “world tyranny” and “American foreign policy,” concepts that are dramatically bloodless. Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci pop up late in the film as U.S. officials with a sneaking admiration for Assange’s audacity, but they don’t add much red meat.
Director Bill Condon (Kinsey) tries to make it propulsive, but it’s mostly in surface effects: hotshot computer type identifying the trans-European locales (Berlin, Brussels, London and Reykjavik); the half-geek, half-bohemian heroes of the WikiLeaks movement, guys with permanent laptop humps as part of their whistleblower chic; and a wan attempt at drama in the third act when one of the agents exposed by the publication of secret American documents tries to escape from Libya with his family.
That leak — the Bradley Manning case, which later became the Chelsea Manning case when the U.S. soldier at its centre sought a sex-change operation — frames The Fifth Estate.
We see the Guardian newspaper, represented by David Thewlis as a rough-and-tumble print guy, publishing the documents that exposed American atrocities in Iraq as well as other hidden scandals. We then go back to the beginnings, when Assange meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl, playing the idealistic Everyman), a computer hacker who helps in the early WikiLeaks exposés. They publish everything from Kenyan government secrets to the contents of Sarah Palin’s emails, giving a window into the malfeasance (or the embarrassing personal opinions) of the powerful.
It’s an odd friendship — the movie is partly based on Domscheit-Berg’s book about WikiLeaks, which has been denounced by Assange — reminiscent of the solipsistic chain of command in The Social Network.
Apparently every online innovator must have a streak of arrogant remove to do his job, and the Assange depicted in the movie takes a classical and tragic road from great democrat to irresponsible demagogue: Huey Long with a Twitter account.
The screenplay, adapted by Josh Singer, feints at an explanation for Assange’s cold demeanour, as well as his unusual hairstyle.
He was raised by a stepfather who belonged to a cult that believed in strict discipline of children, including doses of psychiatric drugs.
It made his hair turn white, he says, although he will later offer other explanations for that condition, often to women who gather around him in bars (Assange’s romantic life is given a bare glance in the movie; the Swedish allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as his current refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, are only mentioned in a postscript.) Assange believes in publish-and-be-damned, and even when the material is explosive, his instinct is to put it all out there and let the people decide.
Domscheit-Berg is portrayed as a more temperate man who grows away from his friend as he sees the damage he is causing. However, to balance things out, Thewlis pops up at the end for an analysis of the new world of journalism and what it all means.
The answer is, who knows? For all its frantic keyboarding, The Fifth Estate doesn’t present a coherent picture. It just throws up a version of the enigmatic Assange and hopes for the best.
What it gets is an unfinished story. Like the tens of thousands of documents in the Manning case, The Fifth Estate is a jumble of facts in need of an editor.