Film Carew: The Imitation Game, Life Itself

THE IMITATION GAME

When word came out that there was to be yet another Oscarbait movie about the English efforts to crack the German Enigma-machine code in WWII, one had the right to be suspicious of Hollywood; that the movie-biz was going on beyond reviving ’80s-toy-line brands to just regurgitating recent prestige pictures. After all, Michael Apted’s Enigma, starring an ascendant Kate Winslet, only came out in 2001. But that film was a slick spy-thriller that loosely used the enigma as a historical marker, a veritable MacGuffin onto which narrative fiction could be grafted. The goal with The Imitation Game is to draw closer to the truth of these war-efforts, the film adapted from Andrew Hodges’ biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma.

It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the subject, director Morten Tyldum (the Norwegian behind Headhunters) imagining Turing as a modernist trapped in 1940s Britain: a gay man, quite possibly on the autism spectrum, working to create the first-ever proto-computers. “Am I a machine? Am I a person?” he wonders, near climax, adding a digital wrinkle to the more plot-centric themes of “Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?”

He’s a mathematic savant, whose beautiful mind can calculate vast sums in a blink, but is unable to understand basic social cues. This makes him an oddball, an outsider, a visionary genius whom the archaic establishment goes out of their way to oppress; this yet another case of a film in which no one can see the truth as clearly as our hero. “My machine will win the war!” Cumberbatch hollers; “you will never know the importance of what we’re trying to do here!” he says, later, defiant at the small-minded military bureaucrats who’ve come to shut down his Turing Machine.

At its simplest, The Imitation Game feels utterly generic: Charles Dance’s glowering, by-the-book British commander one step removed from the cop-movie Chief who throws the gun-totin’ hero off the case; the use of stock newsreel footage and bad CGI of WWII bombers being both jarring and an eyesore; the flashbacks to his tragic first childhood crush having the unfortunate side-effect of making Turing seem less a red-blooded queer, more a passive victim stranded in a state of perpetual homoerotic-schoolboy adolescence.

Its characters, too, feel reduced; not just Dance’s uptight overseer, but Matthew Goode’s smarmy ladies-man, and Mark Strong’s Bond-esque MI6 dandy. Turing is portrayed with complexity, but his role, here, still seems simplified, and the performance depicting him moreso; Cumberbatch going deep into statue-chasing mode with a host of stutters and tics as he kicks against the pricks. It’s amazing to say, but, the best turn herein comes from the normally deplorable Keira Knightley, who plays as mirroring out-of-time modern-woman in old blimey’s old patriarchy (“did you really solve this puzzle yourself, Miss?” a smiling overseer asks, the script serving up salacious archaic sexism for ‘enlightened’ modern audiences). As her character steps nimbly where Turing roars blindly, so too does Knightboat find something more human, more underplayed in her internal conflict than the Cumberbitch does with his tortured-genius routine.

Yet, despite its shortcomings, there’s a sparkle to the screenplay’s structure, which begins in medias res, long after the war is over, with Cumberbitch sitting down with Rory Kinnear (forevermore the star of Black Mirror’s The National Anthem) in a Manchester police station, his voice high-theatrical in a bravura overture that doubles as meta-spiel for those in the cinema: “if you’re not listening carefully, you will miss things,” he commands, “you chose to be here, now pay attention!”

He’s landed in the police station on charges of possible indecency, and this hints at a key reason why the real story of Turing has been brought to screen; why The Imitation Game rails where Enigma glibly entertained. Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality, and in 1952 was sentenced to chemical castration, his remaining days living in ignominy. 50 years after his death, he received a posthumous Knighthood, but, here, it’s characterised less as due reward than tragic, too-late apologia; this film a movie-makin’-as-revisionist-social-justice attempt to shine a light on the life of a man whose days were shrouded in secrets.

LIFE ITSELF

A career chronicle of the world’s most famous film critic, Roger Ebert, Life Itself seeks to mirror its subject’s late-career celebration of cinema as a “machine that generates empathy”, this most uniquely human of artforms the one that comes closest to resembling, well, see the title. This ambition clearly traces back to director Steve James, the maker of documentary masterworks Hoop Dreams, Stevie, and The Interrupters. James has long been a cinematic humanist, and, as a personal friend of the late subject, there’s none of the fawning fandom rife in rote celebrity documentaries. Instead, James chronicles the salacious details of Ebert’s chequered life — his fondness for drunken carousing, his pseudo-sibling rivalry with TV co-host Gene Siskel — with a sense of caution; the themes on which a biopic would be built seeming, here, more like brightly-coloured thread woven through the vast fabric of a life.

James initially began the film as a companion to Ebert’s autobiography, but in the middle of its making, the film turned into something on beyond a mere memoir-at-the-movies. With Ebert’s shaky health taking a dire turn, Life Itself starts to feel like a eulogy for the man in the middle of its frame; James less touched by critic’s relationship to famous filmmakers than his relationship with his wife, Chaz, and her tender devotion in his dying days. James eschews cheap sentimentality at the sight of a Great Man heading towards his grave, but instead uses Life Itself to talk about the passage of time, and our uniquely sentient perspective on it; his film existing, in the story of one man who could be any man, to generate empathy.