The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth: The Imitation Game

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, in The Imitation Game

Filmgoers, like gamers, are natural puzzle-solvers – we like to try and stay one step ahead of a mystery, or piece together a disjointed narrative, or guess at a film’s ending before it arrives. There isn’t much to unravel in The Imitation Game, a film which depicts the life of mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his attempts to crack the German Enigma code at the secret Bletchley Park facility in World War II, but the way the film positions society’s smartest (and most socially awkward) members as the world’s last hope against the Nazi menace is almost as much a love letter to geeky hobbyism as it is a biopic of the world’s first computer scientist. The film isn’t complex enough to be a puzzle unto itself, but so many puzzles abound for the characters to solve – crossword and code-message alike – that it feels like a celebration of how using brains, and not brawn, is often what wins a global war.
 

An Intricate, Beautiful Thing: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water

Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones in The Shape of Water.

Last month, when I attended Guillermo del Toro’s exhibition At Home With Monsters at the Art Gallery of Ontario, one of the things that impressed itself most strongly upon me was the filmmaker’s fascination with otherness. The weird, the unsettling, and the macabre have always had a presence in his work, but his more sensitive artistic tendencies are expressed through his fondness for the freaks and outcasts of the world – those deemed to be somehow “other” than the rest of us. It might not be readily apparent in a filmography full of graphic violence and disturbing imagery, but a deep vein of compassion runs through del Toro’s oeuvre, especially for those who seldom receive it from society. The Shape of Water is by far his most compassionate film, celebrating otherness so directly and so proudly that it seems wondrous he managed to get the thing in front of general audiences at all.

Neglected Gem: The Painted Veil (2006)

Naomi Watts and Edward Norton in The Painted Veil. (Photo: IMDB)

My friend Michael Sragow, who currently writes for the online edition of Film Comment, quipped cleverly when the third adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil was released at Christmas of 2006 that it was the best movie of 1934. He didn’t mean it as a putdown, at least not entirely: the movie, which was written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by John Curran, provides many of the pleasures of old-style Hollywood filmmaking. But Maugham’s 1925 story – about a shallow, self-involved Englishwoman (Naomi Watts) in twenties London who marries a humorless adoring laboratory doctor (Edward Norton) to get away from her mother, moves with him to Shanghai, where she has an affair with a womanizing diplomat from home (Liev Schreiber), and has to pay for her transgression when her husband finds out – is a moral tale in which the adulterous heroine gets punished and learns her lesson. The first movie version actually did come out in 1934, with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall in the leads; it was beautifully lit and very dull, and it had a tacked-on happy ending. (Garbo’s most luminous performances were sometimes set in dross, but this isn’t an example.) The second was a 1957 CinemaScope release called The Seventh Sin, with Eleanor Parker and Bill Travers, which I haven’t seen. That the property remained on the shelf for half a century in between evidences the difficulty of making it appealing for a contemporary audience. (Several filmmakers tried their hand at adapting it in the interim, including Philip Kaufman.)

There Are No Happy Endings: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’s Feel Good 9/11 Spin

Ten years after 9/11 and Hollywood filmmakers are still not sure how to handle cinematic depictions of the tragedy. They obviously and understandably won’t excuse the terrorists for their horrendous crimes. Nor will they blame the United States for what happened that fateful day as one ignorant Toronto film writer did when she wrote that America was both the victim and architect of 9/11. But they also can’t handle dealing with the raw emotions still evoked from that horrible day on Sept. 11, 2001. Excepting for United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass’s emotionally powerful depiction of the occurrences on board one of the doomed flights, they’ve been content to stick to simple emotions such as were on display in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). American independent filmmakers have been more forthright on the subject, but generally have used their platform rather myopically, either assailing supposed Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11 (Civic Duty, 2007) or to criticize American attitudes towards immigrants post 9/11 (The Visitor, 2007). None of the films on the subject, however, have tried to gloss over what happened then or put a positive spin on the tragedy, until now, with the unfortunate release of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And feel good movies about 9/11 are no more palatable or less offensive than feel good movies on the Holocaust like Life is Beautiful (1997) or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).

Neglected Gem #46: Chéri (2009)

Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend in Chéri

Brilliantly directed, ravishing to look at, and built around a stunning performance by Michelle Pfeiffer, Stephen Frears’s film of Chéri ought to have grabbed some attention in the midst of all the blockbusters the critics hadn’t been enthusing over in the summer of 2009, but it didn’t. Frears works from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – his collaborator on his only previous period picture, 1989’s Dangerous Liaisons. The setting is once again France but the period is la belle époque, the years just before the First World War, perhaps the last era that still seems charmingly remote and pre-modern to us. The source is mostly Colette’s 1920 novel about a love affair between Léa, a cocotte nearing fifty and a young man half her age, nicknamed Chéri, the illegitimate son of an old friend from the Paris demi-monde. There’s an obscure 1950 French film of the material, and Kim Stanley played Léa in a Broadway adaptation back in 1959, so the story should be brand-new to audiences discovering it on DVD.