The Fifth Estate (2013)

The Fifth Estate arrives with the solemnity of a film that believes it is documenting the birth of a new century, and settles for being a two-hander about two men who stopped returning each other's calls. Bill Condon directs the rise and rupture of WikiLeaks through the friendship of Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, with Benedict Cumberbatch buried under wigs, false teeth and blue contact lenses. The early targets include a corrupt Swiss bank and a Cayman Islands branch engaged in illegal activity, which lends the proceedings a transparency-versus-power streak. The film is more interested in Assange's hair dye than in the structures he exposed.

The ensemble is international because the real story was, and Anthony Mackie, Alicia Vikander, Daniel Brühl and Carice van Houten fill the newsroom without anyone making a speech about it. Race is never a subject of the film's argument. Laura Linney and Vikander play capable professionals, though their function is to be right at the men and then step aside. Chelsea Manning's leak drives the plot, and the screenplay uses her pre-transition name without a flicker of curiosity about what that might mean. Assange's abrasiveness is presented as a character flaw, not as anything the film wishes to name.

Where the film does raise its voice, it is on behalf of journalism: source protection, redaction, the ethics of the leak, delivered in speeches by people standing in rooms. That is the sermonizing, earnest enough to be respectable and repetitive enough to be tiring. There is no environmental thread, no body-positivity thread, no neurodivergent framing, and the historical record is bent for melodrama rather than remade into modern ideology. WikiLeaks called the whole thing a fabrication. The film is guilty of a milder crime. It is dull, and Cumberbatch is the only reason to keep watching.