NOTHING STRAIGHTFORWARD ABOUT ASSANGE
Documentary about WikiLeaks founder a twisting tale about a complicated man
Not every documentary tells a straight story. Not every one can.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras managed to do it pretty well with Citizenfour, her Oscar-winning 2014 doc about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. But far twistier is this story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, put together over several years, and re-edited several times as new allegations — political and sexual — have come to light, and as Assange has gone from being a cyber-celebrity to a fugitive from U.S. and Swedish justice, living in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for five years as of this August.
Poitras is a conflicted journalist and wisely chooses not to hide her humanity in the face of a bizarre story; we even learn that she had a brief relationship with Jacob Appelbaum, a member of Assange’s circle who has since been dogged by his own allegations of sexual misconduct.
What emerges is a very personal portrait of a very complicated individual whose paranoia (at least partly warranted), starts rubbing off on his chronicler. Poitras takes to hiding out, burning her notes and worrying that an intelligence tip might be an FBI entrapment ploy.
It’s also about what happens when an individual becomes bigger than the cause they espouse.
“The area that I care about is the whole world,” Assange says, but much of his time is spent dealing with lawyers and court cases.
We see him coaching a WikiLeaks spokesperson on how to deflect questions about his sex-abuse charges.
Later a friend advises him that he’s become “toxic” to the cause.
And in a bizarre moment, Lady Gaga shows up at the embassy to interview him.
“Let’s not pretend for a moment I’m a normal person,” he cautions her.
There’s also a scene of the U.S. government dealing with the fallout of possible links between Russia, WikiLeaks and the Hillary Clinton email scandal, with one official announcing “that the FBI, as part of our counter-intelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. And that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any co-ordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
The speaker is James Comey, FBI director from 2013 until his dismissal by Donald Trump this week. The twisty tale continues.
What emerges is a very personal portrait of a very complicated individual whose paranoia starts rubbing off on his chronicler.