THE FIFTH ESTATE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today:


THE FIFTH ESTATE (Dir. Bill Condon, 2013)

“Hero or Traitor?” asks one of the taglines for this dramatized version of the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange releasing today. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to that question isn’t clear at all by the end of the film.

We get from Josh Singer’s screenplay, based on the books “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World’s Most Dangerous Website” and “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” that Assange is a liar and a manipulator, who secretly dyes his hair and falsifies to the press the size of his site’s staff, but as to whether or not he’s actually fighting the good fight – that’s still up in the air.

As portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, having a banner year as he’s popping up everywhere from STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS to 12 YEARS A SLAVE to the sequel to THE HOBBIT (as well as starring in the British TV series Sherlock), Assange is a restless driven power-hungry player full of pompousness and platitudes such as “Courage is contagious.”

This mixed bag of a biopic begins with a montage of news clips from when WikiLeaks broke with the publishing of State Cables in 2010, then jumps back a few years before that to when Assange recruited German tech activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg to help with publicity and technical support on the up-and-coming startup.

Domscheit-Berg played by Daniel Brühl, also currently playing a real guy (Austrian racecar driver Niki Lauda) in Ron Howard’s RUSH, wrote the first of the books mentioned above that the film draws from, so a lot of the point of view present comes from his character.

It seems that Condon and screenwriter Singer sensed that a movie mostly made up of two hackers on their laptops wouldn’t be very visually interesting so they throw in a lot of visual tricks to sexy up the material. They try to take us on a journey through cyberspace with floating headlines and flashy in-your-face graphics, as well as continually returning to the motif of a sandy landscape featuring rows of desks stretching into infinity.

These artsy surreal elements only serve to distract us from the half-baked narrative, and the far from fully formed thesis. The time they take up would be better spent dealing with the sex scandals Assange was caught in that are only quickly summed up in the film’s postscript.

Cumberbatch’s invested performance is the best thing about THE FIFTH ESTATE as he looks and acts the part to a tee capturing Assange’s eccentricities in full throttle. It’s a shame that it’s in the center of such a fussy un-focused drama that works overtime to dazzle its audience instead of actually giving them any weighty insights.

A subplot concerning Laura Linney as Deputy Undersecretary of State Sarah Shaw and Stanley Tucci as Assistant Secretary of State James Boswell glib reactions to WikiLeaks has a few amusing moments, but like everything else here it never really gets under your skin.

Condon’s KINSEY, his 1995 biopic of sexologist Alfred Kinsey starring Liam Neeson, did a better job covering a real-life subject, but maybe his work on the last two TWILIGHT movies clouded up his vision here. THE FIFTH ESTATE isn’t lacking in ideas; it just doesn’t know what to do with them so it throws them all up on the screen. Trying to make one’s way through them is as futile as trying to find the answer to the hero or traitor question in this stylish mess. It’s not here or there or anywhere to be seen.

More later...

Ron Howard’s Race Car Movie RUSH Is A Solidly Sincere Ride

Now playing at a multiplex near you 

RUSH (Dir. Ron Howard, 2013)

One thing Ron Howard, or Opie Cunningham as those of us older folk used to call him, is well equipped to do is make a race car movie set in the ‘70s that really looks and feels like it was actually made in the ‘70s. After all, he cut his teeth on his first full length feature film as film maker, the 1977 smash ‘em up car chase flick GRAND THEFT AUTO.

The gritty grainy look is dead on in Howard’s newest film RUSH, currently #3 at the box office, which dramatizes the real life racing rivalry of James Hunt and Niki Lauda, two Formula One drivers who competed for the title of World Champion in the 1976 season.

Chris Hemsworth, Thor himself, takes on the role of the arrogant beefy British playboy Hunt, while Daniel Brühl embodies the also arrogant tech-minded Australian Lauda, nicknamed “the Rat” on account of his overbite. Through wins and defeats on racetracks all over the world, we ping pong back and forth from the leads’ point-of-views, with pit stops in their personal lives: Hemsworth weds Olivia Wilde as supermodel Suzy Miller; Brühl gets involved with Alexandra Maria Lara as German socialite Marlene Knaus.

But, of course, the heart and pulse of RUSH is when these guys are behind the wheel of their fast machines. One of the most thrilling scenes comes midway through when Brühl’s Lauda gets in a near fatal crash in his Ferrari at the German Grand Prix. He escaped with severe burns after being trapped in 800-degree heat for nearly a minute. This, you might think, would be the end of one’s motor racing career, but in the case of the ultra determined Lauda, think again.

I went in not knowing nothing about Formula One racing history (or any racing history for that matter), but I often couldn’t tell if I was watching real footage or recreations in the riveting race sequences.

I’ve got to really hand it to Howard because I’ve learned that he uses very little film from that era - only two minutes of archive racing footage appears. Kudos to Howard and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, longtime director of photography for Danny Boyle, for how perfectly they pulled this off. It’s a film that would aptly look fantastic on a screen at a drive-in.

Howard has been accused of having no discernible style as a film maker, and perhaps that’s true but throughout his filmography of broad comedies, sci-fi family films, heartfelt dramas, and Tom Hanks headers there is a discernible sincerity.

And Howard’s brand of sincere story-telling scores in every frame of RUSH. Along with delivering the authentic feel of ‘70s race car action, Howard gets great performances out of his cast – Hemsworth proves himself out of his superhero safety zone, and Brühl, best known for his work in the excellent GOOD BYE, LENIN!, shows why he’s somebody worth looking out for (he next appears as Daniel Domscheit-Berg in Bill Condon’s Julian Assauge thriller THE FIFTH ESTATE) - all to the tune of a sharp, well paced screenplay by Peter Morgan (THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, THE QUEEN, FROST/NIXON).

The montage of photos and footage of the real Hunt and Lauda that shows up at the end is, of course, obligatory as the go-to device to cap off biopics and historical dramatizations, but here it fits because the film is so faithful to its source material that the imagery blends beautifully.

So, even though I’m not a racing fan, or sports fan of any type, I liked Howard’s race car movie. I guess my only complaint is its title – couldn’t they come up with something better? Something that doesn’t bring to mind the 1991 Jason Patric/Jennifer Jason Leigh thriller of the same name, a certain Canadian prog rock trio, and a loud mouth conservative pundit, maybe?

More later...