REVIEW: The Fifth Estate

8 09 2015

Ripping the story from the headlines seems to be the most compelling action in “The Fifth Estate,” a fictionalization of WikiLeaks’ history from director Bill Condon and writer Josh Singer.   The film feels irrelevant in the wake of Alex Gibney’s documentary “We Steal Secrets,” a more thrilling and intelligent treatment of these people and ideas that does not even have to resort to fictionalization or melodrama.

The film begins modestly (ha!) with a brief history of worldwide communications, from hieroglyphs to Guttenberg’s printing press all the way to the iPad newsstand.  Then, it proceeds to cut between the WikiLeaks team led by anarchist Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the U.S. government’s response to their destabilizing revelations.

It might have been better off just focusing on its titular estate rather than including subplots involving the second (government) and fourth (press) estates; the tension between the old guard of reporting at institutions like The Guardian and the WikiLeaks “hacktivist” style of citizen journalism feels like a topic for an entirely different film.  Sure, this is an excuse to bring in an ensemble of supporting characters portrayed by talented actors like Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Mackie, Peter Capaldi, and David Thewlis, these accomplished thespians are unable to do much to elevate the material.

As Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg take steps to increase worldwide transparency, their tendency to think more about the information and less about the people leads to conflict.  Plenty of innocent people are taken as collateral damage by WikiLeaks, and their servers offer flimsy protection for the whistleblowers who dare to release sensitive information.  Assange’s personality gets in the way of the story he pushes – a worry that seems to inspire caution in the next major leaker, Edward Snowden, as shown in Laura Poitras’ documentary “Citizenfour.”

Condon uneasily balances Singer’s script that cannot decide whether to focus on who they are or what they did.  For the former, at least Cumberbatch nails Assange’s vocal cadences.  For the latter, though, “The Fifth Estate” cannot even turn one of the most important events of the decade into compelling cinema. Even with one of the newest tricks in the book, adding an M83 song for dramatic impact, the action falls flat.

When the film awkwardly acknowledges its own shortcomings in its odd finale, it feels almost like the creative team saying sorry.  Apology accepted, I guess?  C / 2stars


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REVIEW: In the Loop

28 06 2010

I feel like I should be littering F-bombs throughout this review to keep with the tone of “In the Loop,” a movie where every other word literally was a profane one. But the language isn’t just thrown around indiscriminately. This movie is probably the best thing to happen to the F-word since its invention. Peter Capaldi and the screenwriters use it in such inventive and hilarious ways, none of which are all that irreverent.

But beyond all the profanity, there’s so much more that the Academy Award-nominated script of “In the Loop” has to offer. It’s a brilliant satire of an organization everyone loves to roast – the government. The movie shows politicians struggling over doing what is best for the country or doing what is best for their own interests. Everyone is struggling with this inner conflict, and it ultimately pushes the Britain and the United States towards a military conflict that no one really wants.

We see all sorts of government officials, from elected officials to their advisors to the interns toiling away below them. After Britain’s Minister for Internal Development Simon Foster calls war “unforeseeable,” the fiasco begins.  And once that one word flies, everyone from the Pentagon to the state department in America to Britain’s Foreign Office and Internal Devlopment is involved in a war of words.

Of the countless generals and government officials, my favorite tiny storyline was the rivalry between two twenty-something American aides, played by Anna Chlumsky and Zach Woods, both intent on destroying the other.  The Academy Award-nominated script has all the key aspects of a great screenplay: engaging dialogue to keep a well-organized plot moving. The plot shapers tie together all these plot lines in a very interesting way, although it gets a little exhausting to watch by the time the movie is over.

But the movie’s star is Peter Capaldi’s foul-mouthed enforcer Malcolm Tucker, who has a new obscenity for every time he opens his mouth. No matter what you think of the movie as a whole, it’s pretty hard not to enjoy Tucker. His unabashed speaking of his mind always makes for a good laugh, and his shameless dialogue enables his fellow actors to have their own hilarious moments by calling him out on his excessive profanity. Really, it’s Capaldi’s foul-mouthed antics that make “In the Loop” fun to watch; the satire takes a thought-provoking backseat.  B+ /


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