The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon, 2013)

[colinr0380]

This turned up on television last night so I gave it a watch without expecting too much, but was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this film about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. I think there are certain nitpicky issues that I could find with it (I eventually got used to the hyperactive visual style and fast paced sense of panickily delivered dialogue that feels quite Aaron Sorkin-esque), but this feels like a textbook definition of a 'solid' film, taking wide ranging real life events and forging a coherent and interesting narrative out of them.

There are lots of elements to the structure that feel 'heightened' to create a story but these standard beats play extremely well here. Something like Assange's sudden revelation of a cult/abusive past; Daniel Berg's relationship with his girl fracturing under his hero worship of Assange, leading to a "you have to choose between us!" moment; all the Washington stuff of being more and more incensed by Wikileaks (leading up to the release of the cables and a "who is history going to judge as the 'real' monster here?" coda); the professional news media facing cuts reluctantly using amateur activists to do their investigations for them (or, if we view it uncharitably, appropriating other people's dangerous work without having to face a backlash, because they are just 'reporting' someone else's work, not 'investigating' it themselves), and so on all feel like the kind of themes that a standard (not terrible, just average) film on this subject would sketch in and then allow to stand as the 'moral message' of the film.

Yet where this film feels as if it worked for me (and where a lot of Bill Condon's films feel as if they work, though I haven't brought myself to watch his Twilight entries yet!) is that it takes those standard set ups and messages and then furthers them into really interesting areas. The Daniel Berg stuff is a good example as he's really being used in the classical manner as the audience surrogate (because obviously the audience cannot simply put themselves in Julian Assange's shoes without a more sympathetic and down to earth mediator to guide them into the situation! Though it did raise, sadly unmet, expectations in me that everything would go Fight Club as it turns out that Assange is just a figment of Berg's imagination!), as he falls for the glamorously grungy and coffee-fuelled world of activism (there's an amusing 'seduction' scene in which Assange and Berg sit opposite each other in a cyber café and due to fears of being monitored communicate entirely through computer chat, their open laptops touching in a vaguely sexual manner! I couldn't help but think of the computer chat scene from Closer in this scene!) and then gets steadily more disenchanted with Assange's (lightly suggested to be clickbaity and monomanaical as much as altruistically world changing) intentions. But Berg falls away near the end, and I got a sense of ambivalence there of someone reluctantly severing ties with a mentor at the same time as realising that his future career is built around selling that relationship in the form of a book or article.

Similarly the Washington stuff seems quite broad and silly, but Laura Linney plays her role magnificently as we see her character going from concerned to appalled to suddenly facing the fallout of the document leaks putting all of their secret agents around the world in immediate danger (in addition to losing her job following a few injudicious comments about world leaders that she unwisely attributed to Hillary!). The film in that section is allowing that character to provide us their side of the story, and is showing us the 'real world' consequences of information being passed around the world electronically. Yet in Linney's perfectly played "who is history going to judge?" speech, the film feels as if it is allowing a bit of much needed ambivalence to creep in - sure Wikileaks put the spies in danger, but who had put the double agents and informers into their precarious positions (so embedded they have lives and families) in the first place? Perhaps there is just an annoyance there that all the secret agents have to be moved at one fell swoop, rather than being eliminated in a natural course of events!

The Assange personal life stuff also felt initially a little worrying, then got handled really well. The moment at the beginning when Assange tells Berg (in a moment of apparent opening up) about his step-father being in a cult and chasing his mother and him across Australia, with that being "why my hair is white" is an evocative, 'explanatory' tale to illustrate why Assange is always on the move, always probing, finds it difficult to trust others, challenging of authority and so on. Its almost too perfect a backstory to be true, and the way that the speech happens so early on in an almost too fake a manner during a quiet moment of reflection on a nighttime rooftop (but a staging that feels like it would be the exact kind of staging that a less complex biographical drama would set up!) already set alarm bells ringing for me. Similarly Assange's sudden declaration of being on the autistic spectrum at the mid-point of the film (followed by his outburst on the plane soon after) also feels too neat an explanation for his behaviour, and also a way of concealing the real issues by distraction, burying them under irrelevant information (much as the Wikileaks site itself works!).

There comes a point in this film where the audience has as much past experience of Assange to build their own conclusions from, and that's the point at which many of his actions should be taken with a pinch of salt!

Eventually we get to that scene near the end of the film where Berg reminisces about the time when he once walked in on Assange dyeing his hair white. That's a brilliant moment because it appears to compromise the brief snippets of childhood flashbacks Assange has during the film and puts the lie to Assange saying "that's why my hair turned white" early on. Yet also we've been following Berg throughout the film and only at the end flashback to something crucially important that he witnessed that both he and the film have been withholding from everyone else. That felt like a subtle way of illustrating Assange's point about "everyone holding secrets" in his early lecture. It leaves that feeling that even Assange and Berg (on whose novel this film is partially based, the other being on the Guardian book embodied by the pragmatic David Thewlis character and his final speech about the electronic world being the "Fifth Estate") haven't told the 'whole truth' and been as open and accountable to scrutiny as they expect others to be.

(But in an extra complication perhaps Assange was telling the truth by omission? His hair was turned white at that age, by artificial means rather than shock. But perhaps he kept his hair white to express a physical manifestation of that mental trauma of his childhood, so it was as real to him as anything! Perhaps that 'white hair' revelation also suggests a kind of cult-like indoctrination behaviour that Assange never threw off? Perhaps more than anything this scene shows that just having the basic information is nothing without the interpretative spin that is then put on it)

Whatever the case, as someone who tires a little of films which use clear cut childhood flashbacks that entirely explains the motivation for a character's behaviour when they are older as being rather a cliche trope, the whole handling of this aspect initially really worried me and then surprisingly exceeded my expectations!

And that was only compounded by the hilarious coda in the Ecuador Embassy involving Assange (or rather Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange) being interviewed about the assault allegations and how he feels about the upcoming films about his life. No not that film adaptation, but the fictional one - the one we're just at the end of watching right now! I loved that coda, and its here that Cumberbatch really pushes all the actorish, Assange-observed tics into overdrive as if to emphasise the meta-nature of it all! I'd be surprised if he didn't burst out laughing at the end of that take! (And it all reminded me in a good way of the Vanessa Redgrave bit at the end of Atonement!)

That in itself is a perfect end for a film about the conflict between 'reality' and 'unreality' - where people constantly reveal themselves to not be who they seem to be (making the relatively staid Washington scenes where people actually are just their jobs stand out all the more); where the background world constantly feels flat, bland and out of focus (I love that almost abstract scene of Assange orchestrating an African protest movement early on, which feels as if Assange is constantly disappearing out of the scene after setting events in motion, like a white ghost) while the internet world stretches as far as the eye can see, albeit all populated by one person taking on multiple identities; where the relentlessly flashy camerawork is all about creating obscuring chaos to hide an important message; and where real death is viewed at a safe distance through a lens of the killers themselves, before being mass produced and replicated both in its 'dangerous' pure form and in its redacted, sanitised 'old media' one too. Either way it gets the clicks and sells the papers.

It could very much be possible that I'm reading too much into this film - it feels ambivalent (it could just as easily be read completely as a standard biographical drama without all the extra embellishments I'm throwing in), but in a way that really works. I kind of think its in similar territory, but maybe better, than Steve Jobs - a solid, well crafted drama about relatively current events (or at least still relevant ones) which leaves the audience with lots of fascinating food for thought.