The Fifth Estate

And the world of exasperating Biopics was as prevalent at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) as anywhere else.  With the amount of publicity and talk about Julian Assange over the years, one would have expected a movie that was as good as David Fincher’s Social Network.  While there is every attempt made to look like Social Network, at the end of it all, one is left wondering what could have been instead of celebrating what was.

To clarify, The Fifth Estate is not ALL disaster.  It starts of really well.  The representation of the concept of Wikipedia as an office without end, unlimited seats and multiple people – just a metaphor for the infinite number of people that contributed to wikileaks’ success.  There first conversation between Daniel Berg (Brühl) and Assange (Cumberbatch) is shot beautifully with all the right dialogue, light and camera angles.

There are some really solid dialogues as well.  Like the one that sums up the contribution of The traditional Fifth Estate in putting Assange where he is today, "He's not a source, he's the head of a huge media empire, accountable to no one. And we put him there."  Or one filled with frustration and helplessness, “A 22 year old private with a history of instability and a Lady Gaga CD and we are standing on the verge of the biggest expose in the history of mankind".

But that is all I could find good about the entire movie.  It provides you with fleeting moments of excitement but the script on the whole doesn’t do justice to the enigma that Assange has become today.  I do not say this because it portrays Assange as a sociopath.  It has more to do with the way the story has been narrated.  There is focus on what is not required, albeit fleetingly, but tight scripts do away with the unnecessary – period.  For e.g. What was the importance of showing Daniel and Anke (Alicia Vikander) having sex?

On the other hand, if the focus was moved more towards the man’s life – which coincidentally hasn’t been leaked too much – it would have made much better viewing.  There could, of course, have been more attention to detail and some attempt to keep it more real.  So when Daniel speaks to his friends in German in bits and pieces, why does he have to speak to Anke only in English.

I am not going to say that Bill Condon cannot make good movies.  Yes, his previous effort – Twilight Breaking Dawn – wasn’t one that would be spoken about kindly.  But in The Fifth Estate, he shows flashes of brilliance in between some really ordinary film making.  I was hoping for better and if it weren’t for Daniel Brühl, Benedict Cumberbatch and some flashes in between, The Fifth Estate would have turned into a disaster. 6.5 on 10 for a movie that could have so easily been an 8.  Maybe that’s why it never released in India despite the hoopla (or did it?).

Watch the trailer on http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi27961369/?ref_=tt_ov_vi