The Six Billion Dollar Man

The latest political/historical documentary from Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Why We Fight, Freakonomics, The House I Live In) is a magnificently comprehensive study of Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks who battled several administrations of the US, UK, and other nations over his work leaking sensitive documents and whistleblower accounts to the world's most reputable journalists. Fleeing dubious charges of rape in Switzerland, Assange holed up for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, fearing an almost guaranteed extradition to the US where his work exposing US war crimes was considered treasonous.

Jarecki and his team parsed through hundreds of thousands of files incorporating never-before-seen video from WikiLeaks early days, CCTV recording of Assange's years in the embassy, and a trove of archival footage to present a thorough and often thrilling distillation of the ways journalists have been silenced, corrupted, and placed in ever more perilous positions as powerful governments becomes more and more focused on altering the truth to shape historical narratives and using surveillance, violence, wealth, and political influence to destroy what little faith we have left in the fifth estate.

The film is astounding in many ways, but on a purely meta level, it's impossible when watching this vital story to be aware of how few people will see it compared to, say, a six part Netflix documentary series about a single murder in the 1990s, and that Julian Assange/WikiLeaks merit a single 126 minute feature that very few people will see whereas Paul Rubans/Pee-wee Herman gets a 205 min HBO doc that millions will see. That fact feels symptomatic of something both timeless and part of a new era of hyper-infotainment we entered this past decade.

Jarecki, co-producer Kathleen Fournier, editors David Fairhead, Martin Reimers, and Zora Schiffer, and what I assume is a sizable team of creative and legal collaborators do an incredible job paring all this information down to a digestible length that manages to cover an incredible amount of information in a way that, while unquestionably sympathetic to it's subject, never feels like it's leaving out key matters or glossing over inconvenient truths. I'm not sure if this film will succeed in correcting the common vague perceptions of who Assange is and what WikiLeaks did, but I'm can't imagine anyone doing a better job.