CUMBERBATCH CRACKS IT!
The Sherlock star is sublime as Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing . . . but Keira is simply a cipher
HE HAS al r eady played Sherlock Holmes, Stephen Hawking, Vincent van Gogh and Julian Assange, and tickets to see him as Hamlet next summer sold out more quickly than any in the entire history of London theatre. So it is easy enough to see why Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as Alan Turing, the tortured genius who helped to win World War II by cracking the Germans’ supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. Riddle- solvers and tormented souls are his stock-in-trade.
In The Imitation Game he gets to combine the two. He is quite wonderful as Turing, playing the great mathematician, the socalled father of modern computing, as the awkward, stammering embodiment of what we would now call Asperger’s syndrome.
It is Turing who drives the Bletchley Park team towards their remarkable yet covert triumph, but socially he struggles to interact with them.
The film opens in 1951, however, with Turing working at Manchester University. His flat has been burgled, and a detective, played by Rory Kinnear, thinks that he has something to hide, that he might even be a Soviet spy.
But Turing’s big secret turns out to be more prosaic than that. He is a homosexual, and by the close of the film, found guilty of gross indecency, he is trapped in the downward spiral that would end with his apparent suicide.
A concluding caption tells us that last year Turing was given a posthumous royal pardon, and we are doubtless meant to file out of the cinema railing inwardly at the state- sanctioned homophobia that destroyed this brilliant man, who had served his country so spectacularly but ended up undergoing a process of chemical castration before dying by his own hand (though whether deliberately or accidentally, nobody actually knows).
It is odd, therefore, that for the bulk of Morten Tyldum’s film, the issue of Turing’s sexuality is treated with a primness far more characteristic of the Forties than today.
Nonetheless, we know why, when at Bletchley he builds his enormous, unwieldy computer, festooned almost literally with bells and whistles, he calls it Christopher. Helpfully, the film keeps winding back to 1928, when as a public schoolboy Turing is bullied for his strangeness, but befriended by one other boy, Christopher Morcom ( Jack Bannon), on whom he develops a huge crush.
He and Christopher communicate in code, setting the stage for the cracking of Enigma. And it is Christopher who tells him: ‘Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.’
It is a good line, so good that it pops up twice more, first when Turing recruits a crossword prodigy, Joan Clarke ( Keira And Knightley), to join the Bletchley codebreakers.
of course it is Bletchley that provides the main backdrop to the action, with Turing finding it increasingly hard to convince his sceptical boss, Commander denniston (nicely played by Charles dance), that his unwieldy machi n e
holds the answer to Engima. A shadowy MI6 man, played by Mark Strong, is more sympathetic. But at f i rst Turing alienates everyone, including his colleagues, such are his anti-social quirks. Only gradually does he win them over, until — eureka! — a chance conversation in a pub sparks the flash of inspiration that changes the course of the war.
The Imitation Game bowls along, and evokes the era splendidly. But for a film about such a complicated man, it is sometimes disappointingly simplistic, with far too much expository dialogue, as when a colleague advises Turing to keep his sexuality to himself: ‘You can’t tell anyone, Alan; it’s illegal.’ Like too many other lines in Graham Moore’s screenplay, that’s one for the audience. Turing, I fancy, would hardly have needed reminding.
Mathematician Andrew Hodges, who wrote the biography of Turing on which the film is based, was also reportedly alarmed to find that the script plays fast and loose with some of the facts. He particularly questioned the casting of Knightley: Joan Clarke, he said, ‘was no glamourpuss’. Nor, evidently, was she remotely as pivotal in the Turing story as she is here.
Unsubtly, she and Turing are driven together by their outsider status — he, both weird and gay; she, a woman. And all the while Knightley strains almost comically hard for those cut-glass Forties vowels, trying to locate her inner Celia Johnson as energetically as they all try to crack Enigma.
For numerous reasons, then, this is not quite the film it could, should, have been. But Cumberbatch’s sensitive, moving performance is its beating heart, and the best reason to see it.
COUSIN MARV’S, a blue- collar bar in Brooklyn run by Marv himself (James Gandolfini) and his cousin Bob (Tom Hardy), is the venue for clandestine deposits of illegal cash, hence the title The Drop.
The place is owned by Chechen gangsters, and Marv too is no angel, but Bob seems like a good if slowwitted sort, whose innate decency leads him to rescue and adopt a pitbull puppy that has been beaten and abandoned.
Bob befriends a waitress, Nadia (Noomi rapace), who helps him to look after the dog, and at one level the film is a love story, warming slowly on a very low light. As a tale of the Brooklyn underworld, it heats up more vigorously, bubbling towards a plan to hold up the bar on Superbowl Sunday, when the cash drops will yield an unprecedented haul.
DIRECTOR Michael r. roskam does a decent, moodily atmospheric job with Dennis Lehane’s screenplay, which is adapted from Lehane’s own short novel Animal rescue but includes a few nods of homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. And Gandolfini gives more than enough, in his final screen performance, to remind us what we lost when he died suddenly last year.
But this is Hardy’s film. Last seen as an angst-ridden Welsh engineer in the brilliant Locke, he is no less convincing here as a Brooklyn bartender, whose mind we can practically hear ticking, slowly, behind a near-permanent frown.
LIFE ITSELF is a documentary about late U.S. movie critic roger Ebert. It’s sure to receive lavish critical plaudits, not just because it i s touching, f unny and unflinchingly honest, but also because it makes film reviewers generally, and one in particular, look like they help to make the world go round. Who am I to argue?
I saw it with a friend (not a film critic), who expressed the feeling that in parts it elevates Ebert to the status of a world leader. But his story is worth telling, all the same, and is told splendidly.