Film Review | The Fifth Estate

Films based on true events are almost always crushingly dull. This is because shoe-horning a slice of history into a Hollywood blockbuster format means that the story loses all of its immediacy and variety to collapse into complete cliché.

If you want to make a film about real-life events, a documentary will do just fine. A documentary may have its limitations and will not - by definition - feature top-billing superstar actors, but at least you'll be more or less free to tell the story without the trappings of tired and all-too-familiar plot devices that we've seen in a dozen other films before: be they entirely fictional or kind-of fictional.

Of course, every rule has its exception, and we've actually been privy to one quite recently. Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street was a wild, rollicking ride - a satire that took no prisoners (unless you - rightly - consider its prisoners to be its unapologetically venal protagonists).

But there's the rub: making an artistic effort makes all the difference, not to mention the fact that Scorcese has experience, vision and confidence in spades. Plus, his source material - a memoir penned by his subject - already snugly fits his directorial MO.

No such luck with Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate. Cobbled together from all-too-recent events detailing the history of the controversial whistle-blowing website run by Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), it knows it has very little to go on but plugs its gaps with clichés, not creative solutions.

Much like the far superior 2010 thriller The Social Network - in which director David Lynch spun the tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spurned ex-business partner Eduardo Saverin - The Fifth Estate attempts to hook its viewers by means of a similar 'frenemies' two-hander; the only difference being that instead of a revolutionary social media platform, here we're dealing with a far-more-literally revolutionary online space.

In this case, the put-upon sidekick is Daniel Berg (played by German actor Daniel Bruhl, last seen as F1 racer Niki Lauda in Rush). Just as The Social Network was based largely on the supposed injured party's (aka Saverin's) version of events, The Fifth Estate is partly sourced from Berg's own account of his time as founding partner of Wikileaks and Assange's right-hand-man. As such, the film was pre-emptively denounced as a hatchet job by Assange - currently in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

But bias is the least of the film's concern. If anything, director Bill Condon (Kinsey) and screenwriter Josh Singer (TV's The West Wing) could have done with being a little less 'balanced' and a little more striking in their approach.

That the Wikileaks story is a game-changing phenomenon of contemporary life can't really be questioned. But zoning in on the personalities behind the incendiary network is missing the wood for the trees. As is often the case with biopics that try to cover too much ground with little creativity, the film is rife with superficial, half-baked sub-plots that festoon the already bulimic key narrative.

Examples abound. In an angry, reprimanding missive to Berg, Assange recounts how he spent years fighting for justice and freedom of the press in Kenya - an experience that was apparently invaluable to him and his future endeavours. Wouldn't that be better cinematic fodder? Julian Assange: The Early Years, following in the steps of Che Guevara 'origin story' The Motorcycle Diaries? Better still - and further into Assange's biography - we are also given hints to the white-haired internet revolutionary's childhood, which included a forced induction into a scary Australian cult known as The Family.

Surely this would strike notes of real-life horror, and provide a more nuanced, universal and interesting understanding of our subject (or, if done right, it may at least be a worthy artistic exploration of what sometimes drives self-made 'revolutionaries' like Assange).

Instead we get a little bit of everything fizzling away into not much at all; the filmic equivalent of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. There's a little bit of espionage, a little bit of romance (Berg's fractious relationship with co-worker Anke Domscheit, played by sadly underused Alicia Vikander), a little bit of bromance with a mini political thriller thrown into the mix.

Save for some contrived visual theatrics depicting the Wikileaks 'space' as a physical office that expands, contracts or blows up (depending on what the plot dictates at any given time), Condon offers nothing by way of a coherent visual narrative to keep all the film's threads together.

The priority was clearly to cram in and dramatise as many of the Wikileaks stories that have made the headlines over the past few years, not to tell a well-structured story. Even the closing captions (a convention common to most films depicting historical events) drag on for far too long, and point to a wasted opportunity: some of the most noteworthy facts about the Assange saga are buried there.

Benedict Cumberbatch is, however, to be commended for plunging into the role with such gusto, mastering not only Assange's Australian accent, but also his mannerisms and general demeanour to a T. Cumberbatch has become something of a contemporary It-Boy thanks to his hugely popular take on Sherlock Holmes for the present-day-set BBC adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous sleuth. Sherlock could have easily eclipsed his take on Assage here (who, like the famous detective as depicted in the new series, is something of a 'functioning sociopath' himself) but it's to Cumberbatch's credit that he doesn't.

Shame we can't get the film in documentary form. Oh wait a minute... an almost concurrent release - We Steal Secrets - says that we can. Pity it hasn't reached our shores yet.