‘The Fifth Estate’ movie review: ‘Tasty’ but ‘opaque’ version of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange (photo: Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange in ‘The Fifth Estate’) Late in the game during The Fifth Estate, Twilight director Bill Condon’s long-awaited return to helming real movies, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) glowers at close confidante Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) and hisses, “How much time you can spend with a person and still have no idea who they are.” If only Condon knew we’d be wondering the same thing about the tasty, if opaque, version of Assange he’s asking us to consider. Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer (who adapted WikiLeaks books by Domscheit-Berg and The Guardian journalists Luke Harding and David Leigh), practically luxuriate in the mysterious and contradictory motives that make Assange such a fascinating character, until we realize all The Fifth Estate has to say about Julian Assange is that he’s mysterious and contradictory. The director gets better mileage from sheer storytelling velocity and an electric sense of witnessing history as it’s being written (or posted). That said, all the slick craftsmanship in the world can’t lessen the frustration of watching a deliberately unknowable subject whisk us through a series of events, ticked off with much energy and little insight. At a fundamental character level, The Fifth Estate understands what’s so intriguing about Julian Assange. One can only speculate if he was ever genuinely motivated by an activist’s desire to hold governments and corporations accountable for their behavior or if he merely gets off on his ability to make them shudder at the prospect of his next document dump. And even if his motives are pure, is he being reckless by not holding back the release of information that could cause harm to blameless individuals? Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange: ‘A performance of great technical precision’ As Assange, Benedict Cumberbatch revels in these oily ambiguities. Speaking with an Australian accent and given to toothless smirks of smug superiority, Cumberbatch takes immediate ownership of the character, giving a performance of great technical precision. His stringy, white hair, puffy mouth and curious demeanor suggests The Man Who Fell to Earth’s Thomas Newton reimagined as a rogue visionary with a plan to destroy the world by suffocating it with raw, incriminating documentation. Such determination is on display almost immediately, when Assange meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg at a European hacker convention in 2007. Daniel is swept away by Julian’s sense of purpose and free-flowing quotes from Oscar Wilde and Russian anti-totalitarian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Before long, Assange and his new freedom soldier, using technology that keeps whistleblower submissions untraceable, expose major tax improprieties by Swiss banker Julius Baer and post the membership list of Britain’s far-right National Party. It might be an unfortunate byproduct of his time in the Twilight zone, but Bill Condon over-relies on CGI instead of trusting his characters to propel the story and maintain our interest. Vast rows of unmanned computer desks represent Assange’s anonymous army of truth seekers (which, of course, never existed; Assange did everything) and typed words are projected onto the faces of the actors as their fingers fly over their keyboards. These whiz-bang tricks, combined with a noisy Carter Burwell score and Virginia Katz’s tripwire editing, ostensibly serve to convey momentous events unfolding at DSL-speeds, but really only distract from The Fifth Estate’s underwhelming take on the juicy subject Condon and Singer have been handed. ‘The Fifth Estate’ vs. ‘The Social Network’ The latter makes his big screen debut here, and because he’s a veteran of Aaron Sorkin’s TV show The West Wing, we’re forced to compare his efforts with Sorkin’s Oscar-winning screenplay for another film about the creation of an internet phenomenon, The Social Network. In that script, Sorkin never let the stakes within the story or the pressure of chronicling the birth of Facebook distract him from the crafting of full-bodied characters. Singer is not so focused, giving us a rather routine reading of the increasingly sour relationship between Domscheit-Berg and Assange. It’s surprising Condon would let that go, since early in his career he wrote (and directed) two thoughtful and marvelous character studies (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters). Granted, Singer does show Sorkin-esque dexterity in navigating the various story threads in this overstuffed tale. He effectively sketches the collateral damage caused when WikiLeaks starts embarrassing the US government, putting our foreign moles at risk and forcing traditional media to reconcile their responsibility to report the news with their responsibility to avoid the indiscriminate release of secret documents. ["The Fifth Estate Movie Review: 'Tasty' But 'Opaque' Take on Julian Assange" continues on the next page. See link below.] Image of Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate: DreamWorks / Walt Disney Studios. This post was originally published at Alt Film Guide (http://www.altfg.com/). Not to be republished without permission.