The Tragedy that is The Fifth Estate

Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange

It's well-known that the U.S. government mounted a media blitz to demonize Julian Assange.    Watching The Fifth Estate it occurred to me:

Maybe the NSA coerced Condon to make this terrible picture so future films about Assange would be regarded as box-office poison. Only a conspiracy explains why this movie with these actors is this egregiously bad.

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There is no finer actor than Benedict Cumberbatch. That's a given by this blogger at all times. His work is not the issue.  IT WAS EVERY OTHER ELEMENT OF THE MOVIE.

The script is a monumental turd, an embarrassment to screenwriters everywhere.  No thru-line.  No story.  No structure.  A confusing mash-up of a fine documentary (We Steal Secrets) and some personal issues of Domscheit-Berg, apparently.

Lost in the visual confusion.

The set design is enough to make you want to dig your eyeballs out with a spork.  Is every house, apartment, venue, nightclub, office in Europe really this ugly?  It's almost as if someone set out to make the surroundings so visually confusing the actors would be lost in the mess of stuff and shapes.

How is it Condon shot a scene about a building with a glass roof  that gives us the essential motivation behind WIKILEAKS and Assange's life, that bonds the main characters and no one in the audience can actually make out the glass-roof?  Perhaps if you live near it, see it every day, it's obvious.  But to the entire rest of the world?  Huh?  While trying to figure out wtf Assange and Domscheit-Berg are talking about, you miss the speech.

Missing speeches isn't much of a tragedy in a film that sinks so often under exposition.   But the true tragedy here is that there is a great story to tell. And no one told it.

There is no story, no structure, nothing for an audience to root for.  Or root against, really.   No dramatic line to follow.   What constraints they put on Josh Singer that may have caused him to utter this mess of a script, or who rewrote what, when, we cannot know.  There is no blame for anyone but the man who had the reins: Condon.

Instead of telling the story, the film is a commentary on the story it supposes we already know.

Blaming Benedict

It seems to be popular for American critics to blame Benedict Cumberbatch for this picture's failure, the bottom line being he cannot carry a movie.  Apparently they've missed  Hawking,  To the Ends of the Earth and Parade's End.

Blameless

But Assange is not the protagonist of the picture.  Domscheit-Berg is.  It was Daniel Brühl  who was supposed to carry this picture, if anyone did.  It was Cumberbatch, better known here, on whom the burden of publicity fell for the American audience.

But neither of these actors could possibly save this train wreck of a movie.  They could only do what they could with the roles they played, with the script in their hands at the mercy of a director who seemed determined to try and make both these beautiful men as unattractive and uncomfortable as possible when he shot them.

Time to move on and take with us from the picture what there was of value: