The Imitation Game and The Gambler

If you’re homophobic, or you have homophobic friends, please take them to see The Imitation Game. It may be the best defense of gay people ever made, in that it depicts the closeted British mathematician, Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), essentially saving the entire free world from the Nazis. In return, because he’s a homosexual, his government charges him with indecency and forces him to undergo hormone “therapy” that chemically castrates him—to try and curb his homosexual desires. It’s amazing how little the movie has to deviate from the truth and still be both an astonishing tale of human achievement in the face of grave circumstances and a heartbreaking, infuriating look at the ways supposedly civilized creatures treat each other.

The story of Alan Turing is more compelling than this film adaptation of his turbulent life, set specifically during the Second World War when he and several other geniuses began trying to crack Germany’s Enigma machine. The group soon realizes that deciphering Germany’s messages—the codes of which are constantly changing—will take a human millions of years. However, Turing theorizes that a machine could be made to do the work much more quickly. What Turing invents—as the movie very obviously points out in the end—is one of the first computers.

The Imitation Game is an amazingly conventional film considering the unconventional person it portrays. It’s polished in every way, lavishly laying on an Englishness that feels somehow very Hollywoodized, very calculated to fit an American’s idea of England. The screenwriter, Graham Moore, and the director, Morten Tyldum, are working with a lot of big, emotional themes and situations, such as war and human sexuality and, more simply, human understanding. But the most complex emotional themes they touch on are never fully fleshed out. Those being Turing’s secret sexual proclivities and the fact that once the code-breakers finally do crack Enigma, they’re forced to keep it a secret, using their information to help the Allies without letting anyone know that they’ve accomplished their task. (Germany would simply change their codes and all the work would be wasted, the war prolonged, and more lives lost.)

The film doesn’t seem to know how to handle these themes that well. One of the code-breakers, Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard) realizes that his brother is on a ship that’s about to be attacked by German U-Boats, but the others insist that saving the ship would be disastrous, alerting the Germans of their success at cracking the Enigma machine. There’s a fleeting moment where everyone tears up and Peter is later pissed off at Turing, but the movie never mentions this specifically again. It forgets—the way conventional Hollywood movies do—this very complex, rich emotional problem.

Turing’s homosexuality, which is made sympathetic by all means, is also left unexplored. It’s used mainly as a device for the film, which is split into three stretches of time that are woven together intermittently: the late 1920s, when Alan was a teenager at a boys school, the main period of the film, World War II, and then 1951, when Turing, whose work was still classified, was being investigated by the police who thought he might be a Soviet spy and who then accidentally discovered he was gay. Anyone who knows the story of Alan Turing knows that his life takes an exceedingly dark turn after the war, and that so much of this has to do with English purity laws that, frankly, probably made criminals out of a lot of married heterosexual people too. But somehow, as much as the film tries to humanize Alan Turing, it never examines this subject with any freshness or depth. The biggest emotional beats of The Imitation Game feel the shallowest in terms of their realization.

Turing is portrayed as a typical genius, unable to relate to most people and hampered by his lack of social grace. Keira Knightley, as fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, makes it her mission to humanize Turing to the other men with whom he’s working. Knightley is quite good, a real trooper and a smart, scientific-minded woman making her way in what is still very much a man’s world. Cumberbatch is fine, but his frequent blubbering feels like a sympathy grab for an Oscar. His Alan Turing doesn’t number among his most interesting performances. I have no idea how successfully (or not) he emulates the real Alan Turing, but the performance feels gimmicky, like a textbook portrait of a man with Asperger’s. (Or maybe it’s just a reiteration of his turn as Sherlock Holmes.) He’s like Hollywood’s British version of one of those guys on The Big Bang Theory.

But, the movie is still effective. It has funny moments, powerful moments, a race-against-time plot, and, as I said before, it may soften viewer’s hearts toward the plight of an entire group of people. With Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance, Allan Leech, and Rory Kinnear.

The Gambler—Mark Wahlberg’s latest vehicle—isn’t nearly as put together. It’s a slick study of addiction, but it’s also a complete and utter mess, confusing and weird, rambling and hard to follow. Wahlberg plays an English professor who’s secretly addicted to gambling. He gets in some pretty deep debt and then turns to his mother, played by Jessica Lange, as a rich bitch with genuine softness under her toughened-by-the-men-in-her-life exterior. Lange’s brief moments on screen are the brightest, and the movie quickly descends into a land without logical plot points. I did occasionally drift off to sleep, but I think it was still confusing, even if I’d been completely lucid. And there are times when Wahlberg’s dialogue is absolutely incoherent. He talks faster than he’s ever talked, and the stuff he says doesn’t sound all that important anyway. He uses his lecture class to berate his students for being conventional, and then he uses one of them—the star basketball player—to throw a game. (And he gets romantically involved with another student, a girl who works at one of his favorite casinos.) If this had been made by gambling addicts who put the film together in under 48 hours, it might explain some of its labyrinthine confusion. If you see it, let me know if I’m right or if I was just too sleepy to follow it.

Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Written by William Monohan (an adaptation of the 1974 film starring James Caan). With John Goodman, Brie Larson, Michael K. Williams, Anthony Kelley, and George Kennedy, in a cameo as Wahlberg’s dying grandfather.

Raising Arizona

In the overrated Raising Arizona (1987), two desperate hicks steal a baby from a wealthy couple who have just given birth to quintuplets and try to raise it as their own. The second film from the Coen Brothers (following 1984's Blood Simple) is very much alive, but despite all the verve in its images, and the earnest performances of Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter as the career criminal and police officer (respectively) who unexpectedly fall in love, there isn't much of a movie here. Or maybe there's too much movie, not enough coherence. The film is technically very impressive, the kind of work that film students might do and fool everyone into thinking they had made something truly good because of the imaginative style of their visuals. But actually, the film isn't compelling and the action doesn't add up to much. In fact, it's more than a little sadistic in that there are multiple scenes of horrible tragedies narrowly being averted: A car slams on the brakes right before running over a baby, two cars barely escapes a head-on collision, etc. The violence in Raising Arizona is cartoonish, but somehow nowhere near as funny as it is in a Merry Melody. (And even Merry Melodies had a kind of structure to them, where Raising Arizona is a hot mess, very loosely conceived.) With John Goodman, Frances McDormand, and Randall "Tex" Cobb. 

The Monuments Men

George Clooney's The Monuments Men is the latest in self-congratulatory, cheerfully conservative history-as-cinema offerings from Hollywood. It's a tad depressing that it comes from George Clooney, who has been a part of some really fine films for grown-ups like The Descendants and Up in the Air and several others I'm forgetting right now (not The Ides of March). This one is about the band of semi-soldiers enlisted to rescue priceless works of art that the Third Reich was stealing from European museums and churches and then secreting away in German mines and towns. The story is set late in the war (1944 mostly), and the men scramble around the continent, from Belgium to France to Germany. The cast will surely get your attention, and give you reason to hope for a good time during The Monuments Men: Clooney (who also directed) as the leader, Lt. Frank Stokes; Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett. All of them more or less wonderful actors who are admittedly enjoyable to watch for two hours.

There are several problems with The Monuments Men that made it mostly a disappointment for me. The first is the fact that it panders to us the audience on multiple occasions, and in some cases insults our intelligence. Somewhere along the halfway point, after the men have been involved in a number of dangerous close calls with Nazi soldiers in order to get their hands on a stolen Cezanne or a wrested Rembrandt (and even some genuine tragedies that I won't reveal for the sake of spoiler control), we get a Clooney voice-over telling us why art is worth dying for: it's our culture, our history, and if it is lost, it's as if we didn't exist. (We're reminded of this again and again in the movie, just in case it was fuzzy the first time.) I sat up straighter in my chair, pulled out my notebook, and began furiously jotting down the words of wisdom just in case there would be a quiz after the movie. I really needed an A.

If you pay close attention, you'll find that voice-overs are often utilized when the filmmakers are afraid they haven't been clear enough visually in their storytelling. Or perhaps they're worried we the audience will miss the point of their movie, so rather than allow us to figure it out in our own time, they conveniently hand it over to us in neatly packaged form for immediate digestion. But was anyone really that confused about the importance of saving art during WW2? Was there some poor befuddled audience member thinking, "Why are they going to all this trouble?" Perhaps so, but couldn't the movie have done something to show us this to underline its very obvious point?

And then there's the film's sunny disposition, which isn't necessarily a problem for me in itself--God knows we've had enough misery-inducing celluloid devoted to World War II--but this movie wants to be both a cheerful, light-hearted romp and a scathing condemnation of Hitler and tug at our heartstrings when necessary. There's one scene that stands out in particular regarding the heartstrings-tugging: It's December 1944, the men are all getting weary, and we watch them all react while an angelic young woman purs "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" over the radio. Bill Murray tears up in the shower, and I thought I could even distinguish the tears from the streams of water falling down his face. We're asked to go on this gay romp through the cobblestone streets of Europe, but when called upon, we must rail against the evils of Nazism like we're suddenly watching Schindler's List and this is one of the Auschwitz scenes. And finally, we are expected to reach for the tissues to dry our moist eyes and noses whenever something sentimental happens.

The script--by Clooney and Grant Heslov--isn't much good either. I found myself naturally tuning out much of the dialogue because it was clunky and unclear. And the attempts at humor were often thunderously over-zealous, like when the movie reminds us that Matt Damon's French is bad on no less than three separate occasions, with even the subtitles showing us his crummy translation skills. Yes, it was cute the first time, but did it need to become a running joke? We're also meant to care for these men (and one woman, played by Blanchett) and become emotionally invested in their race against time, but I felt that they were basically cardboard characters, blank slates waiting for us to project our love of masculine heroism onto them. And the movie has no suspense. You know they're going to be successful, because Hollywood wouldn't allow The Monuments Men to fail in their mission (even if they had failed in real life).

There were good parts in Monuments Men, such as the scene when Balaban and Murray are "accosted" by a very young German soldier, who lets down his guard once Murray sits down (gun in hand) and offers him a cigarette. (It's all the more amusing because the kid doesn't speak English and they don't speak German.) And the scenes with Cate Blanchett are interesting: She brings an austere intensity to her character, a French museum worker whose brother is working for the resistance and who turns out to be the key to finding much of the stolen art. But there again I find another quibble with the plot: the movie basically stalls until Matt Damon finally breaks down Blanchett's resolve. (She's suspicious of his intentions, afraid he'll capture the stolen art and send it back to the  U.S.)

Aside from the likably curmudgeonly qualities of actors like Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and John Goodman (qualities that exist outside of this film too, I might add), there's nothing of substance in Monuments Men. It has the light-heartedness of something like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (it's a kind of artistic wild goose chase that's straining for comic effect), and yet it desperately wants to be important and serious and remind us of what we've already known for some time. Hollywood movies that want to be history lessons always worry me, because I don't want movies to be as dry and well-intentioned as the average history lesson. We seem hellbent on ranking the "important" movies in terms of what moral message they can teach us. Even more problematic then is the message of Monuments Men, as it's so damned obvious. Yes, we all know that Hitler was bad. Yes, we all know that art is good. So if you want to be congratulated for liking art and hating Hitler, then this if your movie. 

Argo

Eventually, we are going to have to forgive Ben Affleck for Gigli, Bounce, Paycheck, Jersey Girl and Reindeer Games.

His The Town (2010) was an impressive, enjoyable piece of entertainment, and once again at the helm he's done good work (mostly) with Argo, which is just about as exciting a movie as you'll get this year, although the last half hour is agonizingly suspenseful. Argo recounts (loosely) the 1980 rescue mission of the Canadian and U.S. governments on behalf of six Americans trapped in Tehran, Iran: Amidst the collapse of the Iranian government and increasing tensions between Iran and the U.S., the American embassy is besieged and most of the people inside taken hostage. Six escape, however, and they eventually make their way into the home of the Canadian ambassador.

Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA operations officer who hatches a hair-brained sceme: He will go to Tehran posing as a movie producer, and pass the six hostages off as a Canadian film crew doing a location scout for a bad B-movie, called Argo. Ben Affleck has never looked better than with his black, charcoaly hair and the accompanying beard--something about it feels totally late-70s/early 80s, and it's the hair, I think, that sells his performance. You take him seriously as the man entrusted with the lives of six others.  

Argo is, overall, a very successful political comic-thriller that pushes all the right buttons, sometimes with more demented glee than is enjoyable. As mentioned before, it's a stressful movie to watch, especially in the last fourth of the film--to the point that you stop feeling pleasurably excited. The finale functions as a clever form of audience manipulation, and as you feel your body move further and further from the back of your seat, your hands clasping your hair in sheer suspense, you realize you're being played like an electric fiddle. It's the movies at work, up to their old tricks again. They have this kinetic ability to hypnotize us, and yet we're somehow always aware that they're "only" movies. But the good ones defy our perception of reality. We know it's a movie, but, dammit, we have to know how it's going to be worked out.

The resulting emotion is a mixture of irritation and awe, possibly even gratitude, especially during a particularly impotent movie year. Perhaps we're victims of the crappy material to which we're subjected over the course of the movie year from January to October. By the time the handful of good movies comes out, Stockholm Syndrome has set in, and we become eager and willing participants in the manipulation of ourselves at the hands of our perverse captors.

There's a wonderful cast of grumpy old men: There's Bryan Cranston as Mendez's boss, a grizzled government veteran who stands up for his colleague's half-cocked plan of rescue; John Goodman as Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers (who won an Academy Award for his work on Planet of the Apes); and Alan Arkin as the seasoned movie director enlisted to help give Argo credibility. John Goodman is the kind of actor who makes you laugh the moment he appears on the screen. He's a jovial smartass teddy bear. And is there any actor of his generation who's as fun to watch playing a curmudgeonly hack as Alan Arkin?

With Kyle Chandler, Victor Garber (as the Canadian ambassador), and, as the six Americans trapped in Tehran: Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall (who looks stunning, by the way, in long black hair and glasses--she's never looked so geekily gorgeous), Michael Parks, Scoot McNairy, Kerry Bishe, and Christopher Denham. Also starring Chris Messina, Richard Kind, Titus Welliver, Rory Cochrane, Tom Lenk, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, and in a cameo, Adrienne Barbeau. 120 mins.

The Artist

The Artist (2011) is about a Hollywood star's rise during the silent era of film and consequently his fallout during the transition to talkies. Jean Dujardin plays the actor, George Valentin (the last name recalls the real-life silent screen legend Rudolph Valentino). George refuses to believe that talkies are anything but a fad, and is eventually upstaged by a charming young woman whose first taste of celebrity occurs when she bumps into George at a press conference and they indulge in a spontaneous photo shoot. Her face is splashed across the newspapers with her lips firmly pressed against George's face, and pretty soon she's doing bit parts in pictures, then rising in status and eventually becoming Hollywood's latest girl-next-door.

What seemed at first like it was merely a gimmick to make the film stand out during Oscar season--this is a silent movie, you know--actually made The Artist endearing. George is followed around by his adorable dog Jack, a terrier, and their companionship is absolutely vital to this movie's likableness. Jack becomes a character all his own, something that rarely works out in movies.

I was puzzled by the use of Bernard Herrmann's famous score from Vertigo near the end of the movie. Thematically, it worked (that may be Herrmann's best score), but it didn't exactly make sense to use it. After all, The Artist takes place from about 1928 to 1932, and Vertigo was released in 1958. Couldn't they have composed something themselves? It's such a recognizable piece that its anachronism is pretty obvious to anyone who knows a little about movies.

The humor is what really resonates in The Artist, and the dramatic scenes are moving without being heavy. There's always an undercurrent of humor that in effect relieves those dramatic scenes of their maudlin tendencies. Instead of feeling corny or weepy, The Artist feels like fun--it's richly entertaining. But don't be fooled into thinking this is somehow original. It's really just Singin' in the Rain with a little Citizen Kane thrown in for good measure.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius. With Berenice Bejo as Peppy Miller, the up-and-coming actress who unintentionally steals George's thunder. She's gorgeous, unassuming, and smart; also with John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, and Malcolm McDowell.

The Big Lebowski

How does a movie acquire a cult following? The people at the not-quite-midnight screening of The Big Lebowski (1998) seemed to frolic with this movie. They were laughing like it was the first time they'd seen it, yet I imagine they'd all seen it multiple times. (Many were quoting the dialogue with the movie or even talking over it because they knew exactly what was happening onscreen). This was my first time seeing The Big Lebowski. It's one of those movies you're scolded for not seeing. People love their Coen Brothers movies with a palpable ferocity. It's bizarre until you can find yourself within that kind of ferocious love of a movie.

I'm not partial to the Coen Brothers. No Country For Old Men may be their best work, but it's also pretty hollow inside. One of the most prominent storytelling flaws in their work is the stupidity of their characters' actions. But, in the world of the Coen Brothers this is a device or a bit of storytelling genius rather than a flaw. They try to paint the characters as more real because they do stupid things. It works out being a bit infuriating--and alternately comical, depending on the moment.

As much as this movie is about anything, it's a hodgepodge of old noir movies set in L.A. The Coens appropriate elements of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, and Jack Smight's Harper. But you soon realize that the plot, about a guy (Jeff Bridges, playing the ultimate chronic loser with a flair for bowling and a penchant for White Russians) who's hired to save a crippled millionaire's kidnapped wife, is subordinate to the movie's stoner inhibitions. Bridges' character calls himself the Dude, and it's a pretentious attempt to adorn this movie with qualities that will make it what it's become, an oddball midnight movie. This theater is never packed, and it was packed.

Julianne Moore shows up as the eccentric daughter of the invalid millionaire (see The Big Sleep and Harper). She resents the hell out of her sex-kitten of a step-mother (see Harper). There's also some strand of yarn about a weird-ass cult (see Harper again). And the movie has that affectless feel that Altman most certainly wove into The Long Goodbye. No one really cares about anything. Except bowling. John Goodman gives a volcanic, uproariously funny performance as Bridges' nutso bowling partner, a Vietnam vet who's obsessed with the past and completely in love with his war vet status. Steve Buscemi plays their sidekick, the brunt of their jokes and hostility and fellow bowling buddy.


I find myself riddled with mixed emotions about this movie. I laughed a lot at the craziness onscreen. It's got moments of pure madness, and the movie's nightmarish cast and nightmarishly lackadaisical story are something to be seen, but it also bugged the hell out of me. It's visually stylish and stylized (replete with trippy drug-induced dream sequences that might have come from the mind of David Lynch), but uneven. There may be reasons to care about the characters, but only if you're willing to like their idiosyncrasies. And it's dreadfully repetitive, particularly the dialogue, which is like bad Tarantino. Goodman's character was exasperating, and you wanted him to get abused more than he did (although he also delivered some truly good moments of comedy). Bridges' character constantly bungles things in a way that grows quickly tiresome. Bridges is a solid actor, though, and he carries a movie that's practically been amputated at the gut.