OVP: The Imitation Game (2014)

Film: The Imitation Game (2014)
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance
Director: Morten Tyldum
Oscar History: 8 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Benedict Cumberbatch, S. Actress-Keira Knightley, Film Editing, Original Score, Production Design, Adapted Screenplay*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Sometimes when it comes to a movie you have to consider not only what is in front of you, but also what could be onscreen.  Part of why people see a film like, say The Imitation Game and yawn is not because the subject isn't fascinating, because it is.  This is a really cool story, one of the most fascinating from World War II and that's saying something because there are millions of stories from WWII that have come out in movies, television, literature, and sitting around learning about the War from first-hand experiences.  And as we learn every day, through the deaths of countless veterans of that time period (look at someone like Louie Zamperini dying just months before his story was told onscreen, or any number of our grandparents, including one of mine earlier this year), those stories can quickly disappear if we don't have a pen-and-paper handy.  So it's important that a film like The Imitation Game is made, because Alan Turing's story is one that deserves a big-screen treatment.  It also deserved to not be told in a glossy, occasionally lovely but always less-than-honest retelling like it did with Morten Tyldum's epic, near certain to win a mountain of Oscar nominations but deserving of very few.  Because when you have a real story in front of you, a real opportunity to give a well-rounded introduction of a man who affected the lives of the entire world but is little known to most of it, only telling partial truths is not the way to address such a life.

(Spoilers Ahead, though this is a very famous story and doesn't really need the alert) The film is the tale of Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) and the Enigma project in World War II.  The film is told over three periods of Turing's life, though principally on his efforts during the war to break German codes in order to end Hitler's attempts to overtake the continent.  The film also alternates with Turing's early adolescence, when he becomes infatuated with a boy named Christopher and toward the end of his life in the early 1950's, when he is arrested for committing homosexual activities (still illegal in England until 1967...and before you think "that's insane" the law wasn't overturned in Scotland/Northern Ireland until the early 1980's and wasn't fully overturned across the United States until 2003).  Cumberbatch plays Turing in the latter two periods, and with the exception of the World War II period, the focus of these time periods in on Turing's orientation.

The film's problems I knew coming into the picture, but before I properly dissect those, I want to look a bit more into the other aspects of the film.  The movie is at its best when it's an uplifting underdog tale.  In this way it mirrors recent Best Picture winner The King's Speech, a film that holds up better in memory than it does in execution partially because the grand uplifting moments of the film are the best part, which is also the case for The Imitation Game.  When "Christopher" finally can break the Nazi code-it's a moment of absolute thrill.  When we see Alan finally come out to his fiance Joan (Knightley) we get a wonderful piece of acting that's incredibly memorable.  Even the sappier scenes about how Alan needed to be different, needed to not be "the same" work well, partially because Keira Knightley is one of the best actors of her generation and can actually sell a line as clunky and wooden as "sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine" (wow, I have to hope that Knightley rolled her eyes when she was told by Graham Moore that she'd have to sell that chestnut).  The film is at its best as an uplifting period drama, which is not a bad thing in itself-any genre has the potential for greatness, and if that was all this was supposed to be, then that's swell.

Unfortunately, that's not what this movie is trying to be, and it's not what it is.  I frequently chastise friends and relatives who get far too bogged down in "it didn't copy the book" because movies need to succeed on their own, so if something doesn't work in translation for a Gone Girl or The Hobbit, then it's time to let it go when you get to the theaters.  This is equally true of real life-you can't shove an entire life into a pair of hours-certain things have to be cut even from the most mundane of existences.  However, when you make a certain aspect of someone's life an integral part of your story, you have to spend more time on it.

The problem with The Imitation Game's treatment of Alan Turing's sexuality isn't just that it doesn't have a gay sex scene.  It's also that Alan Turing is too much of a contradiction onscreen to not need more explanation.  The way that Benedict Cumberbatch plays him is less like a man that was readily willing to engage the services of a prostitute twenty years his junior (which is why he was eventually arrested, for the record-you'd be forgiven if you missed that nugget as that character doesn't even get so much as a line in the film...he's just a face that is obscured by a window pane) and more like Sheldon Cooper armed with a British accent.  The entire first third of the film, in fact, is simply the Sheldon Cooper routine (for those unfamiliar, Sheldon is the character played by Jim Parsons on The Big Bang Theory...also, get a television), which makes it all the more unlikely to the viewer that he was willing to throw away an entire career on something he knew to be illegal.  In fact, he looks and acts with his on-again/off-again fiance Joan in a very similar way to his childhood infatuation with Christopher.  There is no intimacy between the two of them, in the same way with Joan (who is, like-it-or-not, the love of his life in the movie, at least until that computer starts working).  The movie makes sure we see Alan as less of a sexual being and more as someone who is desperately lonely.  The film's major miss is not a lack of sex, but instead a lack of reason for Turing's later sexual escapades-we don't see a man who seems perfectly content being celibate throughout the entire war as being someone who would later go mad and decide to get frisky with some random trick.  We see Alan as deeply matter-of-fact and only willing to pursue the things he enjoys, and yet he hates the gay aspect of himself onscreen (it is seen as nothing but shameful and a burden), so we need something more, a reason why he was willing to break an (unjust, but still on the books) law.  And like it or not, filmmakers, a gay sex scene may have been what solved that issue (seeing Alan in that situation would have shed a lot of background on his personality), and it's not particularly perverted to ask for it.

This massive miss in the screenplay deeply hurts Benedict Cumberbatch's performance.  Cumberbatch already has a serious case of the scenery-chewing (did you see Star Trek into Darkness?), and when he's called upon to add an element lacking in the script, we see him equating homosexuality with a series of prissy rejoinders and constantly bent wrists.  In many ways his work here is similar to Philip Seymour Hoffman's in Capote (another film that throws a main character's sexuality out-the-window when it could be quite useful to explaining an enigmatic central figure).  Cumberbatch seems okay onscreen when it's just a series of one-dimensional side performances from Charles Dance (can this man just be in anything-even in something so underwritten he's marvelous?) and Matthew Goode (for someone so handsome and constantly cast, I really wish I could find one role that he was actually great in), but when Keira Knightley shows up he's kind of screwed.  Knightley's Joan isn't content to being just a supporting wife-she's also deeply aware of the constant dismissals of her gender.  Like Alan, Joan is also unfairly attacked for something that society finds off-putting (here, a working woman), but unlike Alan we see what affect this has on her.  The script is kinder to Knightley, but that doesn't mean that she isn't willing to sell the hell out of her big scenes-the moment when she is willing to give up everything that society has impressed upon her as successful for her gender (being a wife and a mother) to play a beard to a man who is willing to let her continue her scientific work...she's dynamite.  The film has fine scoring, limited but lovely costumes, and very lived-in sets, but the principle nomination that it truly deserves is the one that Knightley seems certain to get.

And before we end the review (the movie is going to land on at least a half dozen OVP lists, so we'll be dissecting this thing for months), I want to put in a personal plea on what is so important about this particular film to myself and other gay-lesbian audience members.  When it comes to the Oscars, timing is critical.  You think Meryl Streep would have won her Oscar for The Iron Lady if she hadn't been losing for three decades prior to it?  You think that David O. Russell and David Fincher aren't keenly aware that the next few years is the moment when they're going to make it with Oscar?  Winning an Oscar is a marathon, and after losses for Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and The Kids Are All Right in recent years, plus with the Academy's continued stress on diversity, it's very likely that a gay Best Picture is coming.  This may be the only gay Best Picture that we see in the next forty years (don't believe me?  Look at how many films dealing with racial Civil Rights have won the top Oscar...hell, look at how many films with exclusively female leads have won the top Oscar), and so I'm really hoping that it's not for a film that is willing to dismiss all aspects of being gay except for using the word-that would be a pretty damn hollow victory.  The Imitation Game isn't what anyone should consider a bad movie, but when it has the weight of something like Brokeback's loss nine years ago riding on its coattails (a film that didn't just throw out the gay sex to make it more palatable to straight audiences, even at a time when that might have been easier) and a movement that still hasn't remotely reached its finish line, it shouldn't be considered passable as a consolation Oscar.

Those are my (rather lengthy) thoughts on one of the most critical films of the Oscar season-what are yours?  Did you agree with me that the film needed to focus a bit more on its central character's sexuality, or are you all on-board with what came across onscreen?  Did you learn more about Alan Turing?  Where do you think Imitation Game will rank when it's put alongside Selma, Birdman, Boyhood, and The Theory of Everything in the Best Picture race?  Share your thoughts in the comments!