Julian Assange has raised a lot of serious questions with his website WikiLeaks, which has provided an anonymous submission system for potential whistleblowers, and has exposed corruption all over the world. How transparent should our governments really be? Do reporters have a moral obligation to filter the truth to protect the safety of those being exposed? And who the hell is this white-haired, supervillain-voiced man named Julian Assange anyway? Bill Condon’s drama The Fifth Estate asks all the important questions but fails to answer the only one that matters: why should we care?
Certainly there’s no human reason to give a damn about the people depicted in The Fifth Estate. As Julian Assange, Benedict Cumberbatch is working with his hands tied behind his back, relying on enigmatic presence and behavior to capture a figure who still remains a big question mark to the world at large. He’s prone to big pronouncements and Tyler Durdenish philosophizing as he stands atop tall buildings for no better reason than to sell his metaphors. To hear The Fifth Estate tell it, Assange is a messiah with a hypocritical message, exposing the lies of others while keeping everything about himself a mystery. The contradiction is intriguing. The film’s failure to explore it is not.
Perhaps we’re meant to empathize with Daniel Berg, played by Daniel Brühl as a doe-eyed idealist swept into Assange’s schemes because… that’s what he did, apparently. The Fifth Estate is partially based on a non-fiction book co-written by Berg, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, and yet by film’s end we seem to know even less about him that we do about Assange. Whether or not he believed in them, at least Assange had principles to spew. All Berg gets to do is look at Assange in wonder, and then suspicion, and then scorn. He gets a tacked on love interest, but she only exists to make him question his fearless leader and to look pained when he puts his work ahead of her cooking. Never mind what affection they may share for each other, or what she personally stands for, or even why Berg liked her in the first place.
In any case, we’re certainly not meant to empathize with the government officials and embedded agents placed in harm’s way by WikiLeaks’ revelations. Despite Condon’s frantic attempts to film The Fifth Estate as a cool hacking thriller, complete with CGI recreations of mundane online chat rooms and clandestine meetings between government agents (Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci) and their informants (Alexander Siddig), the real consequences never come. An assassination occurs in Africa as a result of WikiLeaks, and it’s a tragedy, but only intellectually. We never get to know those victims. The only people we do get to know are two generic government officials – likable if only for their casting – who lose their jobs, and the endangered spy who never comes to any real harm.
Video Interview: Director Bill Condon discusses the important questions raised by The Fifth Estate.
So what’s the point of dramatizing the WikiLeaks story if there’s no dramatic pay-off, either to the characters or to the world they supposedly changed? Do we really know so little about Julian Assange and his impact that we couldn’t say anything meaningful about it? If so, why bother putting it in front of the camera this soon except to scream out “First!” like a tedious online commenter? In the film, Assange suggests just putting all the information out there and letting the historians sort it out later. The inert drama The Fifth Estate puts all the questions out there and asks historians to fill in the actual information later. Meanwhile audiences are left wondering why they would even bother.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
