Breaking Dawn director Bill Condon works hard to make The Fifth Estate a visually dynamic Paul Greengrass actioner (shaky cam, driving music, global trotting) but beneath all the grandstanding speeches and frantic hammering of keyboards, The Fifth Estate is in essence a doomed bromance.
Adapted from Daniel Domscheit-Berg and David Leigh's books, The Fifth Estate opens with a snazzy history of the written word from hieroglyphics to the birth of print media to the eve of Wikileaks' release of classified military material in 2010. We then quite noisily flashback to Berlin three years earlier where Julian Assange (Cumberbatch) meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Bruhl) and they collaborate on exposing institutions and secrets to the world…
The Julian Assange here is the same Julian Assange of Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks: he is arrogant, petty and, eventually paranoid. The film rounds on him and ends up dismissing him altogether - it even can't resist making a dig about his hair. Apparently, we can get behind the dream but only if the dreamer makes with the pleasant dinner table conversation. Apart from a fuzzy flashback to a difficult childhood at the hands of a cult, and Assange's sincere hurt over a betrayal of a fellow hacker in his youth, The Fifth Estate doesn't have room for sympathy for Assange. Assange bad, Domscheit-Berg good.
It can smack of a series of scenes set up so Assange can show how smart he is with dialogue serving only as discourse and debate. It really only starts behaving itself once White House aides Linney and Tucci show up and America starts its crackdown on Wikileaks; from there on in The Fifth Estate suddenly grows into itself and becomes a proper movie.
But this is really a romance between Assange and Domscheit-Berg. At one point Assange interrupts Domscheit-Berg and girlfriend Alicia Vikander’s tryst and an incensed Vikander asks her boyfriend to make a choice: Assange or her. When he chooses Assange she walks out, Assange 'okays' this decision by making with some hitherto-concealed emotion, showing Daniel, his 'partner', a picture of his 19-year-old son. Cumberbatch excels at those 'crying inside' scenes but Bruhl struggles to give his lines any emotional heft.
The Fifth Estate might one-sided and it's a little early to tell this story, but it's not dull.
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