For moviegoers who are unaware of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the media sea change of the new millennium — which, sadly, is probably the majority — The Fifth Estate may serve 0as a functional overview of the website, its complicated founder and its vast implications. For the rest of us — the blog-surfing, Times-reading, cable news-viewing, NPR-cranking, book fair-visiting, documentary-absorbing 24/7 political junkies that continue to ensure Aaron Sorkin’s employment — the film is insultingly shallow, a valueless and reductive combination of pseudo-wonky chatter and Hollywood thriller mechanics.
The overarching narrative of The Fifth Estate parallels another techy tale of friendships built and destroyed over ego and fame: The Social Network. As with that film’s depiction of the fractious falling-out between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, The Fifth Estate finds its human core in the relationship between Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Daniel Berg (Daniel Bruhl), the computer whiz who joined WikiLeaks at the outset and helped build it into a controversial enterprise. The way the film — and Berg’s book — tell it, Assange was a disorganized mess with no employees, no office and a single server until Berg came along and elevated his ambitious venture; in turn, he began to worship Assange like a cult leader and, eventually, like the jilted victim of an abusive lover who keeps coming back, despite the inevitability of future abuse.
Along the way, news breaks and secrets are released, trickling through WikiLeaks and upsetting the old guard of print media, represented in the film by the Guardian reporter Nick Davis (David Thewlis) and its editor, Alan Rusbridger (Peter Capaldi). But despite the frequent integration of stock footage — of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Daniel Ellsberg, the late Michael Hastings and more — The Fifth Estate never comes across as a serious inquiry of WikiLeaks, its dubious storytelling belying the exhaustive research that went into it.
Bill Condon, a filmmaker of erstwhile credibility until Twilight came a-callin,’ directs a script by Josh Singer that is based on two books about the inner workings of WikiLeaks during its founding and stratospheric ascent. Surely, neither of them included lines like “These computer geeks are starting to become a real nuisance,” harrumphed by Anthony Mackie’s government official upon news of the Afghanistan war logs leak. Singer’s script is rife with these embarrassing, trailer-ready rhetorical flourishes. The characters in The Fifth Estate may be flesh-and-blood people, but they never cease sounding like self-conscious movie characters operating under the perpetual spotlight of World Changing History.
Again, for the uninitiated, the movie might make a persuasive case for WikiLeaks’ existence as a vacuum for the truth in a world of secrets and lies — if not for the insecure, frosty-haired tyrant running it. But even in this regard, it can’t help telling its audience what to think, in a stilted and ludicrous, “I’ve learned something today” bar chat between Berg and Davies that sounds like a high school civics student’s essay on media ethics. Ironic, this, given that WikiLeaks’ own mission dictates the absence of editorializing, of providing information without bias or analysis.
But The Fifth Estate’s most tragic missed opportunity is its almost complete disregard for the crusading story of Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, the Army private accountable for the biggest leak of secret cables in American history, who singlehandedly provided Assange with a gold mine. Manning’s name is mentioned a few times, along with a single newspaper photo, but that’s it. When documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney released his essential We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, earlier this year, Bradley Manning was an integral part of the film, with his personal demons and motivations sharing nearly equal screen time with Assange’s personal narrative.
There’s a lot of talk about courage in The Fifth Estate, but, like most mainstream media, it chooses to ignore the most courageous player in the story, and the miscarriage of justice that has accompanied his imprisonment for exposing war crimes. In so doing, the movie commits a sin familiar to media new and old: It buries the lede.
THE FIFTH ESTATE. Director: Bill Condon; Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, David Thewlis, Moritz Bleibtreu, Peter Capaldi, Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Mackie; Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures; Rated R; Release date: Friday at most area theaters