Masahiro Higashide’s public fall from grace may be the best thing that ever happened to him as an actor. Since being cast into the entertainment industry wilderness a few years ago, he has delivered some of his gutsiest work, including playing a grieving widower in Hiroyuki Miyagawa’s “Trapped Balloon” and a man suffering from a neurological disorder in Hisashi Saito’s “The Sound of Grass.”
He plays even more wildly against type in Yusaku Matsumoto’s “Winny,” shrugging off his Olympian physique to portray real-life programmer Isamu Kaneko. Showing a Method-like devotion, Higashide gained 18 kilograms for the role and adopts a range of quirky tics and mannerisms. It’s never wholly convincing, but it’s fascinating to watch.
Kaneko is best remembered as the creator of Winny, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program released in 2002 that quickly became the software of choice for online piracy in Japan, in much the same way that Napster had in the West. But while Napster’s creators walked away free to pursue other ventures, Kaneko was arrested and put on trial for enabling copyright violations.
“Winny” does an efficient job of dramatizing this potentially dry legal case, making the essentials easy to follow without over-simplifying them. The film invites comparison to Michihito Fujii’s “The Journalist” (2019), another social-issue drama with which it shares its paranoid streak, neo-noir aesthetic and tendency toward polemic.
Kaneko is portrayed as a guileless innocent, being chewed up by a judicial system that doesn’t flinch at using shady tactics in order to secure a win. His legal team is headed by Toshimitsu Dan (Takahiro Miura), a cyber-crime specialist who seems to be the only person able to keep up with their client’s techno-babble (modern audiences shouldn’t struggle so much). Mitsuru Fukikoshi is on typically scene-stealing form as the team’s chain-smoking star litigator, bringing some much-needed fire to the otherwise tepid courtroom scenes.
At issue is a question that continues to plague the tech industry today: whether creators can be held culpable for how others use their work. Dan initially assumes that Kaneko won’t be charged, for the same reason you wouldn’t hold a knife manufacturer accountable for a stabbing. The film embraces his arguments, making a plausible case that Kaneko’s public martyrdom discouraged other potential disruptors in Japan — though this surely isn’t the only reason why the country has proved such a digital laggard.
“Winny” devotes far too much of its running time to a secondary narrative, in which a provincial police officer (Hidetaka Yoshioka) turns whistleblower to expose corruption within the force. This parenthetical subplot is really only there to illustrate that Kaneko’s software had benevolent uses, but it didn’t need to feature so prominently (and I could’ve done without Yoshioka’s mawkish performance).
Anyone expecting Japan’s answer to “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s riveting, heavily fictionalized account of the early days of Facebook, will probably find it all a bit stodgy. The stakes are too abstract, the human interest too constrained; Kaneko’s amiable relationship with Dan is unlikely to go down as one of the great screen bromances. But while “Winny” isn’t particularly gripping, this still feels like a story that was worth telling, while Higashide’s unlikely lead turn will certainly go down as one of the year’s more memorable performances.
| Rating | |
|---|---|
| Run Time | 127 mins. |
| Language | Japanese |
| Opens | March 10 |
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