MESMERISED BY A
Our brilliant new critic is entranced by Benedict Cumberbatch’s chillingly accurate portrayal of Wikileaks boss Julian Assange
The Fifth Estate (15) Verdict: Rise and fall of a computer nerd ★★★✩✩
AS SHOCKWAVES continue to reverberate f ollowing the accusation by the director-general of MI5 that the Guardian newspaper handed a ‘gift’ to terrorists by publishing confidential files leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden, here comes the story of WikiLeaks to start a whole new wave of tremors.
The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger must have been flattered to be played by an actor of Peter Capaldi’s calibre in The Fifth Estate. But the timing of the film’s release could hardly be worse for him.
After all, if it is unfortunate to be accused once in a week of jeopardising global security, to be accused twice looks like carelessness.
Not that The Fifth Estate does that, exactly, but it does showcase the Guardian’s role in creating the monster that Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks, became.
WikiLeaks is the website set up by Assange to disseminate secrets l eaked by anonymous sources. Which may not have been by definition morally wrong, but nor was it, by definition, beyond moral reproach.
The Fifth Estate concedes this, presenting its version of Assange — brilliantly played by Benedict Cumberbatch — as a flawed crusader for truth whose mutation into a paranoid egomaniac does not diminish the righteousness of his crusade. The narrative moves rapidly and sometimes bewilderingly from continent to continent, and focuses heavily on Assange’s relationship with his German collaborator, computer whizz Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl).
Berg starts off in wide-eyed thrall to the highly charismatic but deeply weird Australian, who claims to believe that scattering secrets under the cloak of anonymity, without accountability, will solve the world’s problems.
Assange beguilingly quotes Oscar Wilde: ‘Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’
Yet Berg comes to realise that his mentor is much more of a danger to the world than a saviour.
Bruhl is fine as Berg, but it is Cumberbatch who carries the movie. When Assange heard that the Sherlock actor had been cast, he emailed him, begging him not to take the part.
Perhaps he realised the portrayal might be t oo uncomfortably accurate, from an actor whose slightly otherworldly countenance has been put to such good use depicting other fiercely intelligent social misfits. HOLMES, after all, surely belongs on the autism spectrum no less than Assange. If that was his concern, he was right. Cumberbatch doesn’t just look like Assange in this film, from the lank white hair to the narrow, suspicious eyes. He inhabits him.
The accent occasionally strays across the Indian Ocean f rom Australia to South Africa, but otherwise it is a flawless powerhouse of a performance.
He takes Assange from the early days of WikiLeaks — when a German bank helping i ts rich
clients avoid tax seemed like the biggest beast ever likely to be caught in the crosshairs — to the unveiling, in 2010, of hundreds of t housands of t he most sensitive U.S. military and diplomatic documents, leaked by the young American soldier Bradley Manning.
Some of these were published by the Guardian.
It ends up showing Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he skulks still, claiming political asylum. He still has highprofile supporters, and there is a joke circulating about him, calling for contributions to his legal fund. But don’t worry — ironic pause — all credit card details will be kept confidential.
Laugh at him, love him or loathe him, Assange provokes not just powerful opinions, but powerful emotions. There are those who think of him with revulsion, as a manipulative, amoral wretch; and those who consider him worthy of a Nobel Peace prize.
Not that there would be much chance of that even if he wasn’t wanted in Sweden, t he home of t he Nobel committee, where there is a warrant f or his arrest in connection with serious sexual assaults.
These widely varying views clearly posed a problem for The Fifth Estate’s director, Bill Condon, and writer Josh Singer. Should they reinforce perceptions of Assange, or challenge them? Or both? In fact, the film does neither, which i s an opportunity missed. It is possible to sit too hard on a fence.
Still, it is a stylish picture that makes a worthy, if sometimes faltering attempt to tell a complicated story, aided by a memorable lead performance and l ots of excellent support.
David Thewlis is terrific as the Guardian’s crack investigative reporter Nick Davies, though I thought Dan Stevens terribly insipid — just like Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley come back to life — as the paper’s then deputy editor (now editor of Newsnight) Ian Katz.
But Thewlis as Davies gets much more screen time, and there is a marvellous scene in a bar in which he conveys to Assange the degree of danger he is in, with mean-looking CIA agents the most civilised of the spooks he can expect to find breathing down his neck. JULIAN ASSANGE, so defiantly arrogant most of the time, is reduced at a stroke to neurotic helplessness, head twitching and eyes flitting, as if wondering when and from where the bullet will come.
As for Rusbridger, he is played in a permanent state of anxiety by Capaldi, who like Cumberbatch has become a giant of the small screen in recent years.
He was priceless as the pit-bullish spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It, and as well as being the new Doctor Who, will soon be playing Cardinal Richelieu in an adaptation of The Three Musketeers.
Tucker, Richelieu and Rusbridger: t wo powercrazed meddlers in t he business of the state . . . and a French clergyman.