Documentary Pick: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013)
For documentaries, it’s back-to-back Gibney as we look at We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Before releasing The Armstrong Lie, director Alex Gibney looked at another highly divisive figure of the last decade, Julian Assange. The interesting thing about We Steal Secrets is that depending on your point of view, it’s either a fair and balanced look at the man and his work, or it’s a hatchet job designed by the surveillance state to further discredit one of its primary critics. If you’re sufficiently open-minded you can see both sides of the coin, and that’s one of the most provocative things about We Steal Secrets – Gibney’s message is, at best, ambiguous.
The documentary tracks the rise of WikiLeaks from its exposure of the corruption behind the collapse of the three main privately-owned commercial banks in Iceland, to its pursuit of bigger fish, mainly documents and media from the U.S. government pertaining to the War on Terror. WikiLeaks’ successes turned Assange into a celebrity, and according to some, it made him the target for those that didn’t like WikiLeaks and its campaign of transparency. The film also addresses the involvement of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, the U.S. Army officer who gave WikiLeaks thousands of classified documents from the Departments of State and Defense.
Gibney embraces the contradictions in the Assange story, both the public good provided by WikiLeaks in exposing what are, in essence, war crimes done in the name of the American people without their knowledge, and Assange’s own personal issues, the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden and a growing sense of his own grandiosity. Without comment from either Assange or Manning, the film does a fairly careful job of not taking sides, and getting all the angles from the various players it was able to speak with. This isn’t a film that’s about decrying Assange, and to some extent Manning, as a hero or a villain. Instead, it posits that theirs is the story of people, perfectly imperfect people following their own directives about doing what they think is right. The trouble is that society at large is split between those that agree, those that disagree, and a great many who are just unsure.
Although the man himself is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, 2013 was the year of Assange in cinemas. Along with Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, the drama/thriller The Fifth Estate, based on a pair of books about WikiLeaks, was also released, but in case you didn’t already gather from the critical reaction, We Steal Secrets is probably the Assange movie you want to see. It’s not a puff piece, but it’s not a smear job either, and one might think that the proponents of WikiLeaks might appreciate Gibney’s embrace of the ambiguity of the hero’s story.