Hello Friends,
Ah, another year has gone by.
Welcome, dear Write Reader(s), to my third annual series of reviews for the Academy Award Best Picture Nominees! I am so happy to be back, and delighted to share with you my eight incredibly unimportant opinions about eight incredibly wonderful films.
I am sure if you have read any of my previous reviews, you are well aware of my inability to watch sad movies (because I’m a pansy). And if you recall last year’s crop, you know there were many. By the time I made it through the selection, I nearly promised myself I would never watch a film in theaters ever again. Until, of course, Captain America: Winter Soldier came out. (I’m a sucker for explosions, and patriotic action heroes.) I am happy to say this year I was forced to watch absolutely zero space movies, and no animal movies! But of course, the Academy giveth, and the Academy taketh away, because there are not one, but two war movies on my list. And so, we start, with the war film that isn’t a war film – The Imitation Game.
The Imitation Game is a poignant film telling the story of Alan Turing, a brilliant English logician and mathematician (say that three times fast) who spent his WWII years working on solving the unsolvable German code machine, Enigma. The Imitation Game has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Morton Tyldum), Best Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Best Supporting Actress (Keira Knightley). The Imitation Game scored a slew of nominations at various other award shows, was honored by the Human Rights Campaign (an LGBT civil rights advocacy group), and was the highest grossing independent film of 2014. Apparently, all it does is win.
[A NOTE FROM THE WRITER: As always, I’ll completely ruin the film first, and then go on to discuss the performances, direction, and/or any other special feature of the film. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading right now, and skip to the end where I tell you to go and see it before next Saturday.]
Let us start at the very beginning, with the plot of the thing. Hold onto your knickers, ladies and gents, because this one is a doozy. Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a mathematician and a prodigy. Throughout the film, we see the younger version of himself at school, we see the young Cambridge professor working for the War Office, and we see the shell of a man he is after it’s all said and done, through a series of flashbacks and two hours worth of non-linear storytelling. So although the film doesn’t actually start here, let’s begin with the moment Commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance) finds Alan Turing sitting in his office. We quickly discover that Turing has no social skills, and is kind of a jerk, and he hires himself to the team of code breakers working to decrypt German messages. He joins Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards. Turing finds all of his colleagues to be inferior to him in every possible way, and does that “dislikable-loner-genius-who-ends-up-saving-the day” thing. Everyone obviously hates him. Turing spends all of his days working on building a machine he has named Christopher that will beat Enigma. When Commander Denniston refuses to give Turing the funding to build the machine, he writes a letter to Winston Churchill, who (quite alarmingly and seemingly without cause) puts Turing in charge and orders the funds to be doled out. After firing Furman and Richards, Turing creates an impossible-to-solve crossword which he publishes in the newspaper, and hires two people who successfully solve the impossible-to-solve puzzle in under six minutes. One of those individuals is a girl, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), who is a whiz, but because of propriety, ends up being hired to work with the secretaries that take the messages to be de-coded. Somehow, through the help of “the girl”, Turing manages to win his colleagues over, which is lucky, because when the machine invariably doesn’t do what it’s supposed to on the first try (and it’s already 1941 by this point), all of his colleagues threaten to quit if Turing is fired. Of course, because Turing is a jerkface/genius, the machine DOES start working, and Enigma is beaten! But they can’t tell anyone, because the Germans would know the code had been broken and then they would just build a new, improved, more-unbeatable Enigma, and name it whatever the German word is for “completely impossible and infuriating.” So they spend their war years picking and choosing which information is to be given to the proper authorities, so they can win the war yet not save quite as many lives as they had hoped. A logical, yet heartbreaking and difficult-to-live-with course of action. The war is won, they are told everything they’ve done is top-secret and thus never happened, they all go on to live their separate lives, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Did I mention Turing is gay? Yes indeed, Alan Turing is a bone-fide homosexual, which of course in England in the 1950’s is a horrible thing, and so he is prosecuted for some fake crime, like public indecency, and is chemically castrated. This hormone therapy is monstrous, and it messes up his brain and motor skills. Being on hormone therapy is horrible, and it was already horrible keeping all of these terrible government secrets, so Turing commits suicide a year later. Because hindsight is 20/20 (and foresight is completely non-existent), scientists spend years studying “Turing Machines”. I’m writing on one right now. Because Alan Turing invented computers, and is the father of all of life, and civilization as we know it.
If your mind isn’t already completely blown, let’s stop talking about the plot. Instead, let’s talk about the back upon whom this entire plot rides – Benedict Cumberbatch. His rise through fame has been entirely meteoric. If you IMdB’d him right now, you’ll see a whole slew of fantastic movies (and Sherlock) that have his name on them. This man is a brilliant actor – one of the best our generation has to offer. His use of his body in the art of storytelling is subtle, yet profound. From the hunch of his shoulders, to the pursing of his lips, Cumberbatch builds a series of quirks and tells that create a bold yet vulnerable genius with a stutter and a secret. Cumberbatch is harsh, then soft, careless then precise, working steadily against the mechanical pace of the film to create space for moments to happen. He is completely captivating, but it’s not obvious. You leave the theater with little recollection of anything but him. I’m going to prematurely “call” the Best Actor race as between Eddie Redmayne (Theory of Everything) and Cumberbatch, who (fun fact!) also played Steven Hawking in the 2004 film, Hawking.
Let’s talk more about the other actors in the film! Just kidding, let’s not. Although everyone else certainly works very hard at keeping up with Cumberbatch, none of them are particularly memorable, including Keira Knigthley, who has come up with a Best Supporting Actress nomination. I’ll be honest – I don’t quite see it in this performance. I was simply relieved that she managed to not play the character she’s played in all of her other films – you know, the period aristocrat who is “spirited” and has affairs/falls in love with unsuitable men. So while she deserves two thumbs up for being anyone other than Georgiana Elizabeth Karenina, Duchess of [insert English town here], I didn’t see anything particularly extraordinary. I do need to give a nod to Alex Lawther, who plays young Turing during his school boy days. His performance was lovely, and I hope we see more of his work, or at the very least that he doesn’t go the way of Macaulay Culkin.
So Cumberbatch is marvelous, everyone else is just trying to keep up, and then there is the non-linear storytelling. I wish I could say I loved the convention of telling the whole thing in a series of flashbacks, but it got a bit tiresome, and a lot confusing. There are three different time periods: the 1927 story about young Turing finding himself while falling in love with a school chum named Christopher, the WWII years where Turing is building computers and breaking codes, and the 1950’s when Turing is being prosecuted for the crime of loving someone. Each storyline is told in no proper order, and by the time you’re an hour in, the only thing you can be sure of is that the part of the story coming next will be the one that seems as though it shouldn’t. I found myself struggling to emotionally connect to the “young Turing” and “police investigation” stories, simply because they were inserted into the main WWII timeline in the most difficult of places. You may notice, if you’ve seen the film, that I have completely left out an entire plot line – the one about the engagement between Turing and “the girl.” It seems like it should be a big deal, but there’s so much else happening that it’s really not. It (in my opinion) simply serves to humanize Turing’s borderline Asperger’s behavior.
Although you might think Cumberbatch is the only reason to see the film, I will say it was extraordinarily well written. Although not very historically accurate, the general story is beautiful, and compelling. I felt a vast sense of tragedy by the end of it all. It’s so much more complex than your typical genius biopic. My one complaint is that due to the multiple story lines, I wasn’t sure what my final takeaway should have been. Should I be happy that a great man did a great thing? Should I be sad that a great man died much too soon? Should I be angry at the English government for criminalizing a man who did nothing to deserve it? Where is my focus? What was it really about, anyway?
All in all, the movie is good, but it probably wouldn’t be all that special if it weren’t for Benedict Cumberbatch. Go see it for his performance alone, and/or to learn a little more about an important man with an under told story. It feels premature to be making guesses about the winner, but I would guess Best Actor will go to Cumberbatch, and some other more wholly deserving film will take Best Picture home.
Live, Love, Learn,
Rebecca &