Every documentary filmmaker begins with deciding on the story to be told, and, then, on how to sustain audience interest.
If your goal is to inform the public or take a stand on an important issue by explaining its origins and exposing wrongdoers, then, you go one way. If your goal is to entertain and shroud your motives by exploring murky personality contradictions, you go another.
We Steal Secrets, veteran filmmaker Alex Gibney's latest documentary (or is it a docudrama?), was skillfully made with the backing of a major media company. It tries to do both.
Ironically, that company, Comcast-Universal, owners of NBC, is at the same time having a major success with another movie, Fast and Furious 6, glamorising a criminal gang that relies on speedy cars.
You could say that WikiLeaks, the subject of We Steal Secrets, also began with a fury - a fury against war and secrecy, and was moving as fast as it could using speedy online postings to challenge media complacency in the digital realm.
The docu-tract uses slick graphics to creatively report on the origins and impact of WikiLeaks, the online whistleblower collective, but then, for "balance" and perhaps to pre-empt any criticisms of any bias, especially too much ideological sympathy, opened the tap on endless criticisms by Wiki-dissidents who have turned on founder Julian Assange, as well as the pathetic patriot hacker-turned-informant who ratted out Manning.
The movie revels in all the negatives that surround him, and his chief and gutsy leaker, Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is now being tried tried in a case that could land him behind bars for life under the 1917 Espionage Act.
On June 1, more than one thousand Manning supporters rallied at the Virginia base at which he is being held. His trial, which began June 3, featured testimony from military prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow of the Army, who charged Manning with a dangerous rtls.
"This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the internet, into the hands of the enemy - material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk," he said.
His defence lawyer David Combs challenged the government, contending, "He was selective. He had access to literally hundreds of millions of documents as an all-source analyst, and these were the documents that he released. And he released these documents because he was hoping to make the world a better place."
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights that also defends Manning explained: "The Manning trial is occurring in the context of perhaps the most repressive atmosphere for free press in recent memory. It was bad enough that the Obama administration prosecuted twice the number of whistleblowers than all prior administrations combined. Then it went after logs and records of journalists and publishers."
It is surprising that the film's very title, "We Steal Secrets" - what many might take as a Wiki-boast - was taken from an interview in the film itself; it was an admission by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden about what the US government, not Wikileaks, is all about. Balancing his espionage boosterism in the movie is a former Republican Justice Department hack.
It is very rare for an indy filmmaker to land interviews with top intelligence honchos. It is unclear who had had the juice to get this "get", as major TV interviews are called in the news world. CIA directors don't tend to make themselves available to films they don't control or have a reason to believe they would be treated respectfully.
The film has had a big promotional push and is already playing in three theatres in New York, a success that masks some of its editorial failings, including its in-your-face attempt at "fairness and balance", the pretext the one-siders at Fox routinely use as their claim to credibility.
The promotional hype for the film initially made it seem like an endorsement of Assange until you read it closely: "Filmed with the startling immediacy of unfolding history, Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks details the creation of Julian Assange's controversial website, which facilitated the largest security breach in US history. Hailed by some as a free-speech hero and others as a traitor and terrorist..."
So, there you are - the movie's real question: is Assange a good guy or not? And what about Manning? Why did he do what he did? So, at the outset, Gibney leaves the political plane for a psychological, or even, a psychiatric one. He is out to personalise, and in the process de-politicise a very political issue, for what's known in the news-biz as "character-based story telling".
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