The Fifth Estate

The Fifth Element
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created on Monday 30th September 2013
Posted On Friday 4th October 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Benedict Cumberbatch shines as Julian Assange in Bill Condon’s over-ambitious take on WikiLeaks, which opens this year’s Toronto film festival.

Catherine Shoard
The Guardian
Friday 6th September 2013

For an employee of the Guardian, particularly one with jetlag, Bill Condon’s WikiLeaks thriller can seem more hallucination than movie. An account of the ascent of Julian Assange and his collaboration with this newspaper (among others) in the publication of classified documents, it plays like one of those dreams in which your office looks normal enough from the outside, but step within and everything’s subtly different. It’s more Scandinavian, somehow; with car park pillars and glass walls to which people attach crucial bits of paper, as on Crimewatch. The editor has developed a sudden taste for shagpile rugs. And why did you never notice the deputy is a dead spit for the dishy one on Downton Abbey?

The Fifth Estate
Production year: 2013
Directors: Bill Condon
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Laura Linney, Peter Capaldi

Such tweaks will not get an artistic license revoked. In fact, in adapting both a book on the affair by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, as well as tech activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s account of working for Assange, The Fifth Estate is a project in whose sources one can place considerable faith. Certainly, Condon does. At times it can feel he’s risked coherence for chronology, giving us his own surfeit of data without offering sufficient kit with which we can sift it.

The plot tracks Assange from the time he recruited Domscheit-Berg, through early online celebrity, before his meeting with Guardian investigative reporter Nick Davies (David Thewlis), who, in consultation with editor Alan Rusbridger (Peter Capaldi) and deputy Ian Katz (Dan Stevens), began working with Assange towards a coordinated launch of hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and war reports. The timeline bumps a bit, but still pushes forward confidently, with our hacker heroes forever arriving in a new city, before some fresh turn of events requires them to slam shut their laptops and rush off again.

The template is David Fincher’s The Social Network, which took the creation of Facebook and turned it into the character study of a neurotic loner with the world at his fingertips. Both films go big with the swishy visuals, this one deploying a bombardment of text and newsreel to suggest the morass of info, plus flight map-style graphics illustrating its flood across the globe. Both films are eager to show that computing is an arena for creative genius, with much clacking on laptops like Steinways. Both also suffer from the problem that watching someone type isn’t, after a while, that exciting. Condon further ups the dramatic ante with Lynchian visualisations of Domscheit-Berg’s inner life, plus a lot of techno.

And both films choose as their key arc the relationship between men most closely associated with the site’s inception. But while The Social Network kept the focus on the anti-hero, relegating Eduardo Saverin’s role to support, this one bumps up the best friend to a lead, overestimating our interest in Domscheit-Berg’s lovelife. Not that the film is really that interested either. At heart, The Fifth Estate is a good, old-fashioned bromance – Assange even gets to meet the parents (spoiler: it doesn’t go well).

As for Cumberbatch, he’s both the asset and the slight undoing; so magnetic as to render hopes of a two-hander redundant. It’s a virtuoso impersonation, from the deep drawl to louche geek twitches. Suited, he could pass for Nick Cave after a night or two in the fridge. Mostly, though, this Assange is as extraterrestrial as Cumberbatch’s Khan in last year’s Star Trek, a lip-smacking vampire typing through the night. From a distance, he looks like a lizardy angel, courageously saving the world; close up he squints and snuffles like a bleached, greasy mouse.

Introducing the film last night, Condon said he wanted to explore the limits of truth-telling: when was a lie too important not to expose, and when was it so crucial you must not dream of doing so? In that, he has succeeded admirably: this is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd. Toronto has prepared itself well for the forthcoming week with a hot potato. Now roll on the cheese.