RISK (Laura Poitras). 91 minutes. Opens Friday (May 12). See listing. Rating: NNN
Laura Poitras has been a classic observational documentary filmmaker up until Risk, a film that struggles to retain a sense of objectivity around its subject, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
In anti-secrecy and hacker circles, Poitras has become famous in her own right. Long-harassed by U.S. airport officials, she was an early adopter of encryption to protect journalistic sources – so much so that NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden reached out to her. That encounter inspired the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which she shot concurrently with Risk.
Beginning in 2011, Poitras began filming with Assange, who made headlines for releasing more than 700,000 classified documents, Iraq War logs, videos and U.S. embassy cables leaked by Chelsea Manning. The doc opens as he is working alongside WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison in Norfolk, England, and is under pressure both from a secret grand jury investigation in the U.S. and sex assault allegations in Sweden.
Risk encompasses the major developments in his life since: he takes refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition for questioning in Sweden and releases of the Democratic National Convention emails, which Hillary Clinton later blamed for sinking her presidential run. Poitras also captures WikiLeaks’ grassroots work in the Middle East, where member Jacob Appelbaum calls out an Egyptian telecom exec on government collusion and leads workshops for an anonymous web-browsing project.
Interspersed with footage are audio clips of Poitras calmly reading from her production diaries, which detail her complicated relationship with Assange. “It’s a mystery why he trusts me,” she says, “because I don’t think he likes me.”
Assange has since denounced the film, and it’s not hard to understand why. He comes off as egotistical and callous and seems to both relish and despise the camera. We see him dismiss his Swedish accusers as radical feminists while a (female) lawyer attempting to media-coach him winces heavily.
Male-dominated hacker culture becomes an even greater focus after Appelbaum is accused of sexual misconduct, and Poitras reveals she had been in a personal relationship with him.
Through all of this, she maintains an ambivalent tone via deliberate pacing, flat narration, drone music and beautiful impressionistic b-roll of Berlin cityscapes. In one scene, Lady Gaga arrives to interview Assange in the embassy and frequently interrupts his self-aggrandizing rhetoric with rapid-fire questioning. “Do you ever just feel like crying?” the pop star asks. “What does it matter how I feel?” he retorts.
The exchange adds a bit of aggressive heat to the movie’s emotionally cold tone. Assange is constantly aware of the camera, and, as Poitras starts pointing that out, Risk subtly morphs into a reflexive documentary masquerading as an observational one. However, Poitras loses access to Assange, who becomes mad that she withheld the Snowden leak from him, and the film falls back into ob-doc mode, running through later developments, such as the U.S. presidential race in standard fashion.
There are no juicy revelations in Risk, so the major takeaway is that sometimes brilliant and subversive thinkers are also problematic. Not exactly a world-changing revelation, but sometimes we need reminding. Assange states as much in the first scene, noting that he has compromised principles and grown “ruthlessly pragmatic” in order to survive.
Ultimately, Risk is more about Poitras grappling with the transition from fly-on-the-wall journalist to a character with influence on the story she is filming. And like Assange, she keeps us at a cool distance.
