Disclosure: as of writing this I haven’t seen The Fifth Estate, the seemingly rushed-to-market movie about Julian Assange opening this year’s Toronto International Film Festival on September 5 with the due pomp and circumstance of a big-time Gala premiere.
However, the words “Dreamgirls director Bill Condon helms…” don’t inspire confidence. Neither does the fact that TIFF opening-night Gala screens have been graced in recent years by masterpieces like Score: A Hockey Musical, Creation and some U2 documentary.
(As I type this, TIFF just postponed the first proper press and industry screening of The Fifth Estate until after its first two public showings, a move that never speaks well of the distributor’s anticipation of critical reaction to a film. Is it ironic that the press won’t be able to declassify an Assange movie before the public can reach its own conclusions? Is TIFF effectively WikiLeaking its WikiLeaks movie?)
As a film about one of the most controversial public figures in recent history, there’s a lot hanging on The Fifth Estate. The premiere comes just a few weeks after Chelsea (né Bradley) Manning was dishonourably discharged from the U.S. Army and sentenced to 35 years for passing a record number of classified government and military documents to WikiLeaks.
The tension between the alleged need for government secrecy in conducting international diplomacy and the pressing social need to shine a light on those same governments’ cloak-and-dagger war crimes is probably the hot-button issue of the past few years, the nut of everything from the Arab Spring to the extent of the NSA spy programs in the U.S..
Like any film that deals with a major historical figure (even a contemporary historical figure), the way The Fifth Estate approaches Assange and the whole WikiLeaks project could crucially shape public opinion around this debate. In this sense, it’s an Important Film, irrespective of whether it’s any good.
In 2010, David Fincher’s engrossing Facebook movie, The Social Network, ushered in a new era for the techno-thriller. Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin proved that a movie about computer nerds could acquire potency through the strength of its quarrelling character types (not since early Simpsons episodes has a piece of pop culture sketched the nuances of nerdery with such sophistication) without revving into the spiked cyberpunk fantasia of Hackers or The Matrix.
The Fifth Estate seems to draw from that same pool of cyber-celebrity. Even the tension between Assange and his WikiLeaks “lieutenant,” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who wrote the tell-all book on which The Fifth Estate is based, seems to parrot the relationship of Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in Fincher’s film. (As a friend joked on Twitter following the release of The Fifth Estate trailer, “Its tagline might as well be ‘You can’t get to 500 million leaks without making a few enemies.'”)
The film appears to pit the hubris of Assange (played by pasty Brit du jour Benedict Cumberbatch) against the more sincere goals of his information activism. To repeat: I haven’t seen the film (though my review will be on nowtoronto.com’s TIFF site shortly after this paper hits the stands), but consider me in a state of worried anticipation.
The Fifth Estate bumpf (“a drama of Shakespearean dimensions” as per TIFF’s program note) appears to promote an image of Assange as conflicted. It seems intended to wire the audience for the question “Is what he did right? Is what he did wrong?”
This may be the worst thing to happen to Assange. Whether he is arrogant or self-interested, guilty or innocent of sexual assault allegations, the purity of his motives is by and large irrelevant. As the Guardian noted in an editorial penned in the immediate wake of protests against the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief’s extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges, confusing Assange’s work with his character does little more than “provide a rhetorical rush.”
Movies may well require such flourishes, but any serious debate about WikiLeaks and Assange would best avoid them. They move the conversation away from the American government, the Church of Scientology and the Swiss banks and put it back on Assange, turning him into an egoistic libertine, a pointy, bleached-blond gargoyle, a literary construct (albeit a “Shakespearean” one).
Characterizing Assange this way is convenient for all the power blocs whose well-tuned operations are, somewhat miraculously, seriously undermined by his work. Whether or not he’s a good guy barely matters.
And that’s why I’m fearing the worst as I gird for the gala.
UPDATE (08/06/2013, 6:54 AM): Read the review of The Fifth Estate here.
johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000
