Second, Snowden and Assange are very different characters. While the former came across as idealistic, principled and straightforward, the latter is complicated, egotistical and cagey—but no less fascinating or determined to change the world.
The third area of difference, though, is perhaps the most subtle and crucial dimension of “Risk”: it’s in Poitras’ attitude toward her subjects. In “Citizenfour,” she mainly served as a journalist who took Snowden more or less at face value in relaying his story and revelations to the world. In “Risk,” as she gets close to Assange and his team, her personal perspective on them evolves even as their circumstances change. From initially seeming motivated by feelings of admiration and solidarity, she ends up more distanced and critical. The result is a film that Assange and his cohorts reportedly hate, even though Poitras’ portrait of them doesn’t feel remotely like an attack.
In this film as before, Poitras presents the story in verité style; aside from some conversations between the filmmaker and Assange, there are no conventional interviews or commentary by experts or outsiders, though Poitras occasionally inserts her own thoughts and moody music (by Jeremy Flower) is used to heighten the drama. This is an aesthetic approach that one can respect, even admire, even if in “Risk” it means a lack of contextualizing information that in some instances might have been very helpful.
The film is not one for any viewer who’s never heard of Assange. Indeed, it’s best suited to audiences who are familiar with the basic Wikileaks saga and thus prepared for Poitras’ much more intimate and nuanced view of events and personalities that the mainstream media tend to present in more reductive terms.
When she begins filming, in 2010, Assange and his small crew are ensconced in an elegant home in the English countryside. Wikileaks has already established its importance by releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents concerning the U.S. war in Iraq, and the crew seems buoyed by their sense of mission and growing renown. We watch as the silver-haired Assange and his associate Sarah Harrison try to get U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the phone to warn of an impending dump of un-redacted documents by another party. They succeed only in speaking with an underling, but Assange, while maintaining a playfully bemused attitude throughout, projects a keen sense of his own importance even at this stage.
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