I realise this is a legal blog. But I do write reviews occasionally, like this one of a film, and this one of a play, both on specifically legal themes, admittedly. I hope there’ll be more like them before long. While The Fifth Estate has no legal content (a Guardian lawyer is portrayed briefly on screen by Camilla Rutherford, but that’s about it) I’ve written so much about Julian Assange that I reckon to review it is just about intra vires.

Based on books by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and David Leigh and Luke Harding, it dramatises the story of Wikileaks from when Domscheit-Berg met Julian Assange in 2007 until he left the organisation at the height of its fame in late 2010 when it collaborated with the Guardian and other leading international media to publish the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the US embassy cables. I enjoyed the film a lot. The Fifth Estate may have got lukewarm reviews in the mainstream media, but it doesn’t from me. It’s well worth your money if you’ve not seen it yet.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance has been praised, and it impressed me too. Partly, it’s the nearly spot-on voice that does it. But there’s a darkness to this portrayal that takes it beyond a mere impression. It’s beyond cliché to call Assange an enigma, but Cumberbatch’s Assange is cold, manipulative and prepared to deceive for what he sees as the greater good. He’s also distant. In a crucial scene near the end he remarks that you can spend a lot of time with someone, yet never really know them. I feel that way about Assange, having heard many interviews with him, read his unauthorised autobiography and now seen two films about him (the other was Alex Gibney’s documentary We Steal Secrets). Perhaps he’s unknowable.

In some ways the film is like a thriller – it has a bit of the Eurowhistlestop feel of a Bourne movie – and maintains tension even though we know where this story ends (or at least substantially pauses). Daniel Brühl is every bit as strong as Cumberbatch in the role of Domscheit-Berg and while the Guardian and Washington scenes are less solid, the heart of the film, the relationship between two men of diverging ideals, is compelling.

Sound and especially vision are the best things about The Fifth Estate, though. Carter Burwell’s score is self-effacing but effective; oddly it feels as though there’s little music in this film, though actually you hear a lot. Even more impressive is the look of the film. The computer graphic effects are well done and the “virtual fantasy” scenes are an inspired touch (Wikileaks’s cyberspace is visualised as a vast office floor). Quite apart from these successful creative techniques, The Fifth Estate uses colour well and takes pleasure in visible place like the scenery of Iceland and the anarchic energy of Berlin’s Tacheles building. Mark Kermode says

the visual fizz is hiding an essential emptiness, a hole where the film’s meaty core should be

a problem which he sees as linked to indecisiveness and the attempt to be fair. Which brings me to the last and in a sense most important point.

Julian Assange calls this film “distorted” and “debased truth” and says Cumberbatch’s performance is bound to be “debauched”. But The Fifth Estate, while undoubtedly portraying Assange as egotistical, manipulative, disloyal, dictatorial and reckless with others’ lives – a considerable moral indictment, for sure – does also make a point of fairness to him in more than one way.

No mention is made in the narrative of his being subject to criminal proceedings in Sweden (a caption at the end says, problematically I’d suggest, that he’s wanted for “sexual misconduct”; perhaps the filmmakers thought it too risky, given all the jurisdictions in which this film will be seen, to call at least one of the allegations against Assange by its English name: rape). His mission and that of Wikileaks is not presented as either discredited or wrong. We’re made to feel the courage of Assange and his closest collaborators, to understand something of his personal magnetism and drive and the importance of his leadership, and made to recognise the achievements and the potential of his radical kind of journalism.

More importantly – and this is almost destabilising for the film – Assange’s character is given the last word, speaking directly to the audience and encouraging them to see this story as simply a version, and to find truth for themselves. He may be right; but if so, then the version presented in this film is as fair as any. Assange is right that the portrayal of him as a person is negative. But only by suppressing criticisms that have been made by those who’ve worked with him, and only by glossing over the moral issues raised by the unredacted publication of sensitive documents, could it have been much fairer.

Go to see The Fifth Estate if you have a chance. As a record of events it can’t rival the excellent We Steal Secrets (which also deals with the story of Private Manning, not covered in any depth here, and with the Swedish investigation). But as cinema, it’s a very good piece of work.

2013-10-14T19:07:50+00:00