The Fifth Estate fails to make a point

Just like the website that is the basis of the story, The Fifth Estate has seen a great deal of controversy long before it premiered. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has campaigned against the film, going as far as releasing the script on his website and making a public appeal to star Benedict Cumberbatch to distance himself from the film. Assange forgot the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. A great deal of attention has been paid to his comments, and the incredibly poor buzz the film has gotten has been largely ignored … not exactly working in his favor. The question that faces us now, however, is whether or not The Fifth Estate’s bad buzz is deserved.

I’m not so sure. Maybe I was swayed by the whispers I had heard in advance a little too much, as I walked into the film with expectations that the person behind me in line could have tripped over. But as someone who largely ignored the Wikileaks saga as it happened, I was fascinated by the story. The performances were all pretty damn good, and it was an incredible cast (it is a dream cast for nerds; you had Sherlock/Khan, Harry Potter‘s Professor Lupin, Deep Space Nine‘s Doctor Bashir, the next Doctor Who, Game of Thrones’ Melissandre and Marvel’s Dr. Erskine and the Falcon). But did all of these things add up to a good thing? Well no, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. The Fifth Estate isn’t a horrible flick, but it surely isn’t a great one either.

Great performances and a good story aren’t enough to save the movie. It was missing something, but I think that most will be in disagreement on what that is. Some will find the slow pacing a struggle to keep interested in. Others will find shifts between foreign languages and accented English off-putting. My biggest frustration with the movie was it never really committed to which side of the story it wanted to tell, but also rejected objectivity. Film can be a medium that tells a historical story with little subjectivity (All the President’s Men), which didn’t seem to be the intent here. Assange wasn’t portrayed in a particularly positive way, nor was the story’s antagonist … but Daniel Brüel’s Daniel “Schmitt” was decidedly the protagonist. The film pulls its final punch: is Assange a savior or a demon?

In this case, it isn’t for the audience to decide; even if you know very little of Wikileaks, the flick presents enough evidence – especially through a side-story (presumably fictionalized) that focuses on Stanley Tucci, Anthony Mackie and the always-wonderful Laura Linney – of the potential human impacts of Assange’s leaks to provide a counter the Wikileaks mission. There is little to no coherent case for the website; what little is provided by Schmitt and his dynamic with Assange. The usual balance of a story that expects the audience to “come to their own conclusions” isn’t there, and the film suffers as it sits between objectivity and subjectivity.

The film also employed a very specific visual metaphor that I found incredibly off-putting. There was a stylized version of the Wikileaks “office” which incorporated shadowed desks (with the occasional worker) in a space that opened to the clouds. The idea is apparently how Schmitt saw Wikileaks “working” but felt odd and out-of-place every time the film came back to it.

Usually when I see a film with expectations as low as they were for The Fifth Estate, I find myself giving the flick a big pass. There is a great deal – specifically the performances by the cast – of positive to find, but not nearly enough to overcome the film’s deficits. Several of my fellow critics had a much better opinion of the film, so maybe the public will respond to it better than I did … but I doubt that will be the case.