THE IMITATION GAME: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at an indie art house (and some multiplexes) near me:

THE IMITATION GAME 
(Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2014)

This historical biopic is the perfect storm of a holiday season prestige picture.

It’s got the ‘true story of a hero who triumphed against all odds’ scenario. It takes place during World War II. In Benedict Cumberbatch, it stars an A-list leading man that people haven’t gotten sick of yet. It’s got Keira Knightley. It’s got a distinguished supporting cast. It’s got a sweeping score by acclaimed composer Alexandre Desplat. It’s being distributed by the Weinstein Company.

Yeah, it’s got Academy Award fodder written all over it.

But wait, for Morten Tyldum’s THE IMITATION GAME, which tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who cracked a German code helping to win WWII, is a much livelier, wittier, and all around more entertaining piece of Oscar bait than just about anything else in the current crop of contenders.

Especially when it’s compared to James Marsh’s bland Stephen Hawking biopic THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, or Bennett Miller’s unengaging FOXCATCHER.

Turing’s tale is told through flashbacks to the late ‘30s through the mid ‘40s from the vantage point of the early ‘50s when the police, in particular Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear), are investigating a suspicious burglary of Turing’s home in Manchester, England.

This is where we first meet Cumberbatch’s Turing, who comes across like a blend of his own Sherlock Holmes, with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, and Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory in his amusingly heightened arrogance about his superior intelligence. 

After Detective Nock sizes Turing up as an  “insufferable sod” who may be hiding something, the film flashbacks to 1939 London right as war is being declared on Germany. The 27 year old Turing, then a Cambridge undergraduate in mathematics, is recruited by Britain’s top secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to be part of a team of the country’s top cryptographers to try to crack the Germans' “Enigma” code.

Turing considers the code “the most difficult problem in the world” and is determined to solve it, not caring about alienating his colleagues, which include Matthew Goode, Allen Leech, and Matthew Beard, or pissing off his superiors, which include Charles Dance as a highly irritated British Commander and Mark Strong as the icy head of MI-6, with his methods. 

Through a newspaper crossword puzzle competition, a young woman named Joan Clarke, played pristinely by Keira Knightley  comes aboard the project, and goes on to have a close relationship with Turing, despite the fact that he's a homosexual.

The film skip seamlessly skips back and forth from wartime to the investigation of Turing in the '50s (even including some flashbacks within flashbacks of when our protagonist was a school boy), even making space for some WWII footage (maybe its most unnecessary element - I mean, we have the History Channel for that), with a very pleasing pace. 

Many have pointed out that this film, which is based on Andrew Hodges' 1992 biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” takes a lot of liberties with the facts concerning what really went down at Bletchley Park.

I.e. the real life Turing didn't singlehandedly invent and build the machine that broke the code, he didn't name the machine Christopher after his first lover, the police didn't uncover Turing's homosexuality while investigating him for being a possible Soviet spy, Turing didn't have any contact with the actual Soviet spy John Cairncross (played by Leech) who's depicted in the film as threatening to expose Turing's homosexuality if he blows his cover, and Turing wasn't a cold humorless robot who wouldn't understand an invitation to lunch.

But despite these fabrications, or possibly because of them, the film is a rousing experience with a compelling narrative drive. Graham Moore's elegantly written screenplay makes the biopic formula feel fresh again, and power and passion that Tyldum brings to telling Turing's noble story can be felt in every frame. So much so that its abundance of inaccuracies can be forgiven as conventions created for dramatic effect.

The fine performances by Cumberbatch, Knightley (this sure makes up for LAGGIES), and their fellow thespians are no small part of how well this machine of a movie works as well.

THE IMITATION GAME will undoubtedly and deservedly get major award season action, but don't dismiss it because it so blatantly looks like it was designed just for that. It's a thoroughy engrossing introduction for movie goers to the basics of why Turing is incredibly important to our modern world, but folks who see it should really do a little reading up on the man too.

More later...

Keira Knightley Floats Through The Lackluster LAGGIES

Now playing at an indie art house near me:

LAGGIES (Dir. Lynn Shelton, 2014)

Maybe 2014 is the year of the bad title (see: EDGE OF TOMORROW). Titled SAY WHEN (which isn’t much better) in the UK, Lynn Shelton’s sixth film concerns Keira Knightley as a woman in her late ‘20s lagging behind in her life with little direction or motivation. 

Although she has an advanced degree in counseling, Knightley spends her days in a slacker job as one of those street corner sign spinners - a gig her insurance salesman father (Jeff Garlin) gave her – and her nights with her doting long-term boyfriend (Marc Webber).

When Webber starts to propose at the wedding reception of one of their friends (Ellie Kemper) Knightley freaks out and flees the party, and on the way out she catches her dad cheating on her mother.

Shortly afterward she stops at a grocery store and a group of teenagers headed by Chloë Grace Moretz ask her to buy them beer. Considering it a rite of passage, Knightley obliges then finds herself hanging out with the kids in a park until late that night.

Deciding that she needs a break from things in order to get her shit together, Knightley asks if she can stay at Moretz’s for a week while she tells Webber, her friends and family that she’s going to a week-long career seminar.

Knightley is found out almost immediately - before she even spends one night hiding in her new teenage friend’s bedroom - by Moretz’s divorce lawyer father played by a jaded Sam Rockwell who jokes: “Hey, did you hear the one about the grown woman who started hanging out with pubescent kids?”

LAGGIES isn’t bad, it’s just blah. It has cute moments, and some well observed humor but there’s not much to it. Knightley does a good job, especially with her convincing American accent, as do Moretz and Rockwell but this material – written by first-time screenwriter Andrea Siegel just goes through the predictable motions.

There have been so many movies, especially in the world of independent film, about young people having trouble transitioning into adulthood – Jason Reitman’s YOUNG ADULT comes to mind – so the beats are all too familiar. Anyone watching this film will know that Knightley is going to break up with her boyfriend back home and end up with Rockwell, and the realizations that our protagonist has that get her to that point are so obvious and spelled out.

Like Moretz’s subplot about whether or not she should tell a boy she likes him at the prom, there’s nothing really interesting going on here. There’s very little conflict, and it’s light on moments of insight or drama (though Kemper puts in some of her best acting in a coffee shop confrontation scene with Knightley), as Siegel’s script just skirts the surface of these situations set mostly in Seattle suburbs. It simply doesn’t breathe any new life into the ‘wake up and take control of your life’ trope.

LAGGIES, which I would've called FLOATING because it's something Knightley's character says about herself more than once the movie, joins the sad club of lackluster indies that have quickly come and gone this year including the abysmal MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, the depressing LISTEN UP PHILIP, and the fake film noir of THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY. Just like those forgettable films, LAGGIES doesn’t just fail to connect with audiences, it fails to connect period.

More later...

JACK RYAN: Shallow Reboot

Opening today at a big ass multiplex near you:

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT 
(Dir. Kenneth Branaugh, 2014)

I just got through the painful process of accepting Chris Pine as Captain Kirk in the relaunched STAR TREK series, now I have to accept him as Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in another reboot of a Paramount franchise too?

Apparently so as Pine is the fifth actor to fill the shoes of the intrepid CIA agent since the techno thriller series based on Clancy's novels started in 1992 with Alec Baldwin in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. Harrison Ford took over the role for two entries - PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER in 1992 and 1994, then after a break of eight years, Ben Affleck made an unsuccessful stab at the Ryan role in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS (2002).

Now, after another long break we've got JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT, helmed by Kenneth Branaugh, who also plays the cold-eyed Russian villain. This being his directorial followup to THOR, Brannaugh has now officially re-branded himself as a big studio action movie maker.

David Koepp and Adam Cozad's screenplay, which isn't based on any particular Clancy novel, rewinds to the beginning of Ryan's career - we first see him as a student at the London School of Economics watching the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers on television. After a stint in the Marines where he almost loses a leg in a helicopter accident, Pine's Ryan gets recruited by Kevin Costner as a CIA operative to be a deep-cover financial analyst working on Wall Street. This is something he keeps secret from his fiancé (Keira Knightley), TRUE LIES-style, into the present day.

So far, so formulaic.

Learning of a possible terrorist attack that would lead to an American financial crash, Pine travels to scenic Moscow to thwart Branaugh's evil industrialist plotting to bring on what he calls “the second Great Depression.”

I feel like J.K. Simmons as a befuddled CIA man in the Coen brothers' BURN AFTER READING when I ask “the Russians?” I mean, I know that the roots of Ryan are based in Cold War espionage, but here it seems that the Soviet backdrop is aping recent similarly set spy capers like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL or, worse, the fifth DIE HARD movie which came out this same time last year.

The lack of genuine suspense is palpable in this routine mess in which the fight and chase scenes are horribly edited, the dialogue stiff, and the pacing scattered through the distractingly shiny surfaces.

And the film has no business being in IMAX as it wasn't shot by IMAX cameras and it has no big cinematic money shots that warrant such presentation. Even in what's supposed to be the movie's big climax, involving a van carrying a nuclear device going off the side of a bridge into the Hudson river and exploding, they don't show it long enough to make any impact.

There's also a mind-numbing Russian restaurant-set centerpiece sequence in which Knightly (who should go back to Victorian-era costume dramas and not attempt an American accent again) tries to distract Branaugh over dinner while her hubby is breaking into Branaugh's office that drags the whole narrative down. Hard to believe that screenwriters Koepp and Cozad thought that this was inspired material at all.

In a confident yet somewhat wooden performance, Pine is fine as the reluctant title character, but beyond his egghead calculations there's not much of a persona on display. 

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (such a generic title) is a shallow reboot that doesn't know how to elevate its hero into anything approaching the heights of Bond or Bourne, and make itself out to be anything better than standard issue spy fodder. 

More later...