Until you adopted the ups and downs — nicely, principally the downs — of Julian Assange’s life over the previous 15 years, you’ll have to attend till the final half-hour of Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, The Six Billion Greenback Man, to know what its title means.
By that time, the WikiLeaks founder had been holed up for over six years on the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the place he confronted imminent arrest by the UK authorities. It’s then that we find out how the primary Trump administration provided, by way of the IMF, to mortgage Ecuador’s authorities $6.5 billion in the event that they agreed to kick Assange out. The transfer will not be precisely surprising, particularly coming from a dealmaker like Trump, and it exhibits simply how a lot the U.S. authorities had been prepared to pay so they may nab considered one of their most wished males.
The Six Billion Greenback Man
The Backside Line
Standard however substantive.
Venue: Cannes Movie Pageant (Particular Screenings)
Director: Eugene Jarecki
2 hours 6 minutes
A lot of Jarecki’s jam-packed and informative two-hour characteristic, which premiered as a particular screening in Cannes, focuses on the decade-plus authorized rollercoaster experience that Assange and his staff of dedicated attorneys had been obliged to take. The movie can get a bit repetitive throughout all these scenes on the embassy, which isn’t essentially the most cinematic of places. However we do grasp the sense of confinement and rising paranoia Assange skilled for years on finish. Technically he wasn’t in jail, however his life was underneath home arrest.
The primary half of The Six Billion Greenback Man offers us a number of the backstory main as much as that time, displaying how Assange rose from unknown Australian hacker to worldwide hero of free journalism to public enemy primary, particularly for the American authorities.
Based in 2006, his tiny startup WikiLeaks turned a phenomenon the following yr when Assange launched a video known as Collateral Homicide, unveiling leaked footage of U.S. Marines massacring Iraqi civilians. (Jarecki features a lengthy excerpt, which is as disturbing now because it was again then.) Within the years that adopted, the location dumped hundreds of redacted paperwork on-line, together with navy area logs, diplomatic communications, and many nasty emails between members of the Democratic Nationwide Committee.
This was a promising time for the web, when it appeared like on-line journalism may shake up the world order. “Would you reasonably not know?” a bearded Edward Snowden explains (presumably from Moscow), referring to all the knowledge Assange was providing up freed from cost. However that interval can be short-lived, particularly when the U.S. struck again towards the various compromising paperwork WikiLeaks was placing out in public. “A combat with the Pentagon solely ends a technique,” is what one interviewee tells Jarecki, and the remainder of the film exhibits how our authorities desperately tried to land Assange behind bars, leaving him no possibility however to take political asylum in the one place he may get it.
Jarecki isn’t any stranger to the abuses of U.S. energy, particularly in early options like The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Why We Struggle that targeted on disastrous American overseas coverage, from the Vietnam Struggle to the Struggle in Iraq. Within the opening sections of his new doc, he does an excellent job contextualizing the significance of Assange’s work, which aired a lot of embarrassing — to not point out criminalizing — soiled laundry underneath the administrations of each Obama and Trump, neither of whom come off pretty much as good guys right here.
Sufficient occurred in these early WikiLeaks years to fill a complete sequence, requiring Jarecki and his staff of 4 editors to condense tons of fabric till they get to the guts of the matter for them, which is Assange’s ten years of authorized hell in England.
Two co-stars seem within the story at that time: The primary is Jennifer Robinson, a human rights lawyer and fellow Aussie, who defended Assange when he first obtained a global arrest warrant in 2010, then caught with him till the bitter finish. The opposite is Stella Assange, an legal professional and advocate for WikiLeaks, who fell in love with its founder whereas he was underneath embassy lockdown, giving beginning to their first little one. For all of the darkish clouds of that interval, the silver lining was that Assange — whose authorized woes began with an finally dropped rape investigation in Sweden — managed to seek out his soulmate.
Chock-full of speaking heads, archive footage, CCTV photographs, clandestine iPhone photographs and catchy music cues which can be additionally a tad apparent (in a single scene, M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” drops as Assange tosses precise paper planes out of a window), the filmmaking in The Six Billion Greenback Man might be much more typical than the person in query, whose look adjustments drastically because the years of purgatory drag on.
But when there’s extra substance than type in Jarecki’s film, there’s additionally loads of truth-telling. And as Naomi Klein says towards the top of the movie, in a easy assertion that sums up what WikiLeaks represented again when it was created, and nonetheless means proper now in our age of rampant misinformation: “The reality issues.”