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One of the final sentiments of the WikiLeaks drama “The Fifth Estate” is that great stories usually start at the beginning.
In the case of this film, though, a preoccupation with beginnings, of multiple sorts, becomes its downfall. Firstly, rather than home in on the landmark release of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables (the meat of WikiLeaks’ real-life story, and surely, of this film’s translation of it), “The Fifth Estate” attempts to cram every bit of the organization’s rise into a frantic narrative. Only when it hits the so-called “Cablegate,” a leak prompted by now-jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning (neé Bradley), does the movie truly become compelling.
Written by “West Wing” veteran Josh Singer, whose script is a composite adaptation of two books about WikiLeaks, “The Fifth Estate” — named for entities considered beyond the fourth estate of the press, like bloggers, pundits, and citizen journalists — also tries to apply a ghostly backstory to site founder and mastermind Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose supposed motives for secret-trafficking are as hokey and overwrought as the film’s obsession with Assange’s white hair.
Directed, inexplicably, by Bill Condon, a filmmaker whose genre-jumping is less an expression of versatility than a lack of personal style, “The Fifth Estate” hurtles through its first half at an impossibly hasty clip, its deluge of information apparently aiming to mirror the site’s own data influx, but playing instead like a distraction from the fact that there’s not much human substance here.
Like “The Social Network,” this fact-based cyberpunk flick hinges its sentiments on a friendship gone sour, this time between Assange and ex-partner Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl). But since the movie favors narrative excess over character and relationship nuances, this brotherly struggle isn’t sufficient in grounding the film’s events. And despite a committed performance by Cumberbatch, and some inspired visuals underlining media’s irreversible changes (like an imaginary office space aptly placed in a desert), “The Fifth Estate” remains a rather gluttonous mess, as gratingly impenetrable as scads of encrypted code.
The Fifth Estate
R
One-a-half reels out of four
Opens Oct. 18 at area theaters
Recommended Rental
Before Midnight
R
Available Oct. 22
One of the absolute must-see movies of 2013, Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” his third outing with lovable lovers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), catches up with the couple in Greece, where they’re vacationing with their two young daughters—new arrivals since 2004’s “Before Sunset.” The pair has aged, and so has the tone of their relationship, and the ways in which Linklater, Hawke and Delpy explore this (the actors co-wrote) are of such profound, universal depth that anyone who’s ever loved will relate.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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