The Imitation Game

Craig Mathieson started his review by describing, “Benedict Cumberbatch is to aloof geniuses as John Wayne was to stoic cowboys: numero uno.” Having already given us “Sherlock” on BBC and Australian hacker-turned activist Julian Assange in “The Fifth Estate,” Benedict Cumberbatch is now in “The Imitation Game,” released in 2014, as Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who played a central role in winning World War II and inventing the computer, yet lived in secrecy before committing suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.

Morten Tyldum’s biographical film is a series of interwoven mysteries. The first is whether Turing can solve “the most difficult problem in the world:” breaking the daily code made by Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine (put 18 zeroes after 159 and you have the number of possible solutions). Others include whether he can interpret people he keeps meeting, and navigate his homosexuality.

Taking place in 1951, where a burglary at his Manchester apartment brings a curious police detective, played by Rory Kinnear, into his life, showing how Turing’s orientation led to an opinion (homosexuality was illegal then), which led up to his death. Turing barely acknowledges being gay, and neither does the film. Mathieson noted, “It would have made a fascinating element, if only because Cumberbatch is so convincing as a brilliant, obsessive loner that it would have been fascinating to watch him add desire and physical intimacy to his portrayal.”

Mathieson continued, “That said, the movie makes the cloistered world of Bletchley Park, the country estate where Britain's cryptanalysts worked during WWII, a place of gripping drama.” Turing fights with the building’s no-nonsense naval commander Denniston (Charles Dance) and his suave team leader Hugh (Matthew Goode), and his only supporter in building a machine to crack Enigma is a fellow outsider, a brilliant woman named Joan Clarke (Kiera Knightley) who must act as a secretary.

Mathieson compared, “There are wry exchanges in Turing's social mystification, but you may also be reminded of Jim Parsons' Sheldon from television's The Big Bang Theory.” “The Imitation Game” goes on a fine line in making the familiar effective, also reflecting “A Beautiful Mind” at parts.

Mathieson said, “Tyldum's last (Norwegian) film, 2011's Headhunters, drew black humour from a superiority complex, but here he reaches for the stirring, aided immeasurably by Cumberbatch's exacting performance.” However, he especially doesn’t rest on victory: cracking the code simply means allowing enough Allied soldiers to die so that the enemy doesn’t suspect anything. That’s the tragedy that lights the film: no solution is ever perfectly complete.

This was a film that I didn’t expect to make such a turn the way it did. When everything was revealed, I was in shock, but that was because I never suspected the reveal of Turing’s orientation. I didn’t know anything about him, but this film really educated me on his life. However, this is still a good movie that I think everyone should check out. See it on Netflix because it is currently streaming on there. You will love it, I promise.

Alright, we have reached the end of “Pride Month.” I hope all of you enjoyed this and stay tuned next month to see what I will review next.

I Love You, Phillip Morris

If you wanted to make a movie about the life of Steven Russell, you might start with this question: Could we cast Jim Carrey? You would need an actor who can appear both instantly lovable and always up to no good. That “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” released in 2010, is based on a true story is relevant only because it is too outrageous to be fiction. Russell is a con man, and his lifelong scam is selling himself to himself.

All of this starts when he finds out he isn’t who he thought he was. His parents tell him he is adopted. Roger Ebert said in his review, “My notion is that if you love your parents, and they tell you you're adopted, you'd love them even more. It doesn't work that way for Steven Russell. Once that rug has been pulled from beneath his feet, he sets about creating a new reality for himself.” He becomes a police officer. He marries Debbie, played by Leslie Mann, as good as a toothpaste model. They have two children. He plays the church organ. He is a poster boy for truth, justice and the American way.

Continuing to find the truth, he finds out who his birth mother is. As some may predict, she is a disappointment. After a traumatic accident, he has time in the hospital to look at his entire life being made out of other people’s spare parts. Who is he really? He decides he is gay. Not only gay but flamboyantly, stereotypically gay, and soon living with a Latin lover, played by Rodrigo Santoro, on Miami’s South Beach. He beings to pass checks and falsely use credit cards to finance their rich lifestyle.

Ebert said, “Now when I wrote "he decides he is gay,” did some of you think you don't "decide” to be gay — you simply are, or are not? I believe that's the case almost all the time. I'm not completely sure about Steven Russell. The movie reveals him as an invention, an improvisation, constantly in rehearsal to mislead the world because he has a need to deceive. Who could be less like a church-going cop and family man than a South Beach playboy? Does he like gay sex? Yes, and very energetically, indeed. Does he like straight sex? You bet he does. He can sell himself on anything. I think gay sex is the easier sell here.”

The method of “I Love You, Phillip Morris” gives great amount of plot and then holds them at arm’s length. This isn’t really about plot. Plot are scenarios that characters are involved in. Steven Russell improvises his own scenario, so that most of what happens is his own work in one way or another. Carrey makes the role seem easy. He cheats as naturally as others breathe.

The authorities have a supporting role. He keeps breaking the law, and they keep arresting him. After he’s in prison for theft and fraud, life changes when he’s given a new cellmate: Phillip Morris, played by a blond Ewan McGregor as we’ve never seen him before. He falls in love. Or maybe, as the song puts it, he falls in love with love. After he’s released, he creates a new identity, a lawyer, and floats this trick with a single amount of proof to pull off a stunt that gets Phillip out of prison. McGregor rises to this role like an impressed babe.

Undeniably, Phillip is in love with Steven. However, he is slow to understand the wisdom and density of Steven’s creations. He’s a sweet, naïve kid with a Southern accent and not the smartest guy out there. He’s a witness as Steven steals a lot from a health-care organization that has possibly never even hired him. Steven is soon back in prison, and the movie unfolds into a series of increasingly daring and convoluted confidence schemes.

Ebert noted, “All of this, as I said, is based on Russell's own story, as written by Steve McVicker of the Houston Press. Russell imitated doctors, lawyers, FBI agents and the CFO of a health-care company. He convinced prison officials he had died of AIDS and later successfully faked a heart attack. He escaped from jail four times (hint: always on a Friday the 13^th). He is now serving 144 years in Texas in maximum security and solitary confinement, which sees a little much for a man who never killed anyone and stole a lot less money than the officers of Enron.

This is another movie everyone should see. If you’re a fan of Carrey and McGregor, then this is one you should check out. It’s really good, but like all nonfictional movies, I don’t know how closely this follows the life of Russell. I never knew anything about the man, but that’s probably because when he was sentenced to 144 years in Texas, I was a child when they made that verdict. All of that aside, you should still see this movie because it is a good one.

Look out next week to see what I will end “Pride Month” off with.

Boys Don't Cry

Gender was more interesting when we knew less about it. When we continued from dark instincts rather than easy understanding. Roger Ebert said in his review, “Consider the Victorians, slipping off to secret vices and how much more fun they had than today's Jerry Springer guests ("My girlfriend is a dominatrix"). The intriguing border between the genders must have been more inviting to cross when that was seen as an opportunity rather than a pathology.” One of the many features of “Boys Don’t Cry,” one of the best films of 1999, is that never once does it say the cliched line, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body.” Its motto instead could be, “Girls just wanna have fun.” Teena Brandon doesn’t think of herself as a gender case study. Nothing in her background has given her that word. She is a lonely girl who would rather be a boy, and one day she gets a short haircut, puts a sock down the front of her jeans and goes into a bar to try her luck. She is not a transsexual, a lesbian, a cross-dresser, or a member of any other category in the long list of gender identities. She is a girl who thinks of herself as a boy, and when she leaves Lincoln, Nebraska, and moves to the town of Falls City in 1993, that is how she presents herself. By then she has become Brandon Teena, and we must use the male pronoun in describing him.

All of this is true. Ebert mentioned, “There is a documentary, "The Brandon Teena Story," that came out earlier in 1999 and shows us photographs of Brandon, looking eerily like Hilary Swank, who plays the role in "Boys Don't Cry." In that film, we meet some of the women he dated ("Brandon knew how to treat a woman"), and we see the two men later charged with Brandon's rape and, after the local law authorities didn't act seriously on that charge, murder a few days later. Like Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, Brandon died because some violent men are threatened by any challenge to their shaky self-confidence.”

Ebert continued, “"Boys Don't Cry" is not sociology, however, but a romantic tragedy--a "Romeo and Juliet" set in a Nebraska trailer park.” Brandon is not the smartest person on the block, especially at judging what types of risks to take, but he is one of the nieces, and soon he has fallen in love with a Falls City girl named Lana, played by Chloe Sevigny. For Lana, Brandon is arguably the first nice boy she has ever dated. We meet two of the other local boys, John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom (Brendan Sexton III), neither the smartest boys, both violent offspring of dangerous backgrounds. They have the same belief about women that a trigger-happy person has about prying his dying fingers off the revolver.

The film is about hanging out in gas stations and roller rinks and lying slouched on a couch looking with rounded eyes at television, and dead-end jobs, and about six-packs and country bars and Marlboros. There is a reason county music is sad. In this desolation, which is all Lana knows, comes Brandon, who brings her a flower.

The Lana character is important to the movie, and despite Hilary Swank deserving all the praise for her performance as Brandon, it is Devigny who gives our entrance into the story. Representing the several women the real Brandon dated, she sees him as a warm, gentle, romantic lover. Does Lana know Brandon is a girl? At some point, certainly. However, at what point exactly? There is a stretch when she knows, and yet she doesn’t know, because she doesn’t want to know. Romance is built on illusion, and when we love someone, we love the illusion they have created for us.

Kimberly Peirce who directed this movie and co-wrote it with Any Bienen, was faced with a project that could have gone wrong in so many ways. She finds the right area. She never takes the story above the level it’s comfortable with. She doesn’t emphasize the vacuousness of the local law-enforcement officials because that’s not necessary. She sees Tom and John not as simple murderers but as the tools of deep ignorance and inherited anti-social pathology. (Tom knows he’s trouble. He holds his hand in a flame and then cuts himself, explaining, “This helps control the thing inside of me so I don’t snap out at people.”) The whole story can be explained this way: Most everybody in it behaves exactly according to their natures. Ebert said, “The first time I saw the movie, I was completely absorbed by the characters--the deception, the romance, the betrayal. Only later did I fully realize what a great film it is, a worthy companion to those other masterpieces of death on the prairie, "Badlands" and "In Cold Blood." This could have been a clinical Movie of the Week, but instead it's a sad song about a free spirit who tried to fly a little too close to the flame.”

This is an emotionally difficult movie to watch. But that doesn’t mean that it is bad. It just talks about a situation that is still happening today and raising awareness on it. So many members of the LGBTQ+ community have been murdered because of who they are, and that needs to end. I might be wrong, but I think transgenders have been the ones that have been murdered the most. The time for this must end and this movie explains why. It’s a true story that everyone should watch to see and know about. I had never heard of Brandon Teena, but I was only a child during the time he must have been murdered. However, Hilary Swank did a good job and she even admitted this was a hard movie to recover from, getting emotional about it during her interview on Inside the Actors Studio. See it for yourself because it must be seen to be believed.

Now that we have discussed this, check in next week when we look at another biographical film in “Pride Month.”

The Birdcage

Recently I was thinking about what I was going to review for this month, but when I found out that June is Pride Month, I thought I would review certain movies to watch for this month. Let’s get started with the 1996 comedy, “The Birdcage.”

Roger Ebert started his review by saying, “Hollywood has had a little cottage industry in recent years, turning out American retreads of French films. Now comes the remake of the most seductive target, the comedy "La Cage aux Folles" (1978), which is about a gay man whose son wants him to play it straight for a few days. All of this will be familiar if you've seen the original, or the two sequels, or the Broadway version.”

“The Birdcage” isn’t about plot, anyway. It’s about character, and about the strange thinking of screwball comedy, where everybody acts the craziest just when they’re trying to make the most sense.

What makes the late Mike Nichols’ version more than just a rework is good casting in the main roles, and a great screenplay by Elaine May, who keeps the original story but adds little quips here and there (“Live on Fisher Island and get buried in Palm Beach – that way you’ll get the best of Florida!”).

The movie stars the late Robin Williams as Armand Goldman, the owner-operator of a drag show on South Beach. He lives upstairs over his nightclub with Albert, played by Nathan Lane, the tar of the show, who has been in a relationship with him for some 20 years. Albert is a basket case, threatened by trespassing age and insecurity. He works only because Agador, played by Hank Azaria, the colorful houseboy, sedates him with Pirin tablets. (“They’re just aspirin with the ‘as’ scraped off,” Agador reveals to Armand.) A problem. Armand’s son Val, played by Dan Futterman, has become engaged to a girl, and wants to bring her home to meets his dad, but not “Auntie Albert.” The problem is that his fiancée’s father is a conservator senator, played by Gene Hackman, who leads the Coalition for Moral Order and thinks the pope is too controversial and Billy Graham too liberal.

Albert is heartbroken that the boy he raised like his own son is turning against him. Armand is also upset, but goes along with a cover-up where Val’s mother, played by Chrstine Baranski, who had Val after a one-night stand with Armand, will pretend to be Mrs. Goldman.

Imagine everything that can go wrong, including the uniqueness of Val having two mothers onstage at the same time, and you have the rest of the movie.

Since the material is familiar, what’s a little nice is how fresh it seems at times, with an American cast. Robin Williams is the best surprise. He’s in a role that seems written as a license for splendor, he’s more controlled than in anything he’s done since “Awakenings.” Ebert noted, “Nathan Lane, from Broadway's "Guys and Dolls," doesn't have quite the semi-hysterical sincerity that Michel Serrault had in the original, and his impersonation of Val's mother is a little too obvious and over the top, but he works well the rest of the time, especially in his more pensive passages.” One problem is that some of his highlights (like when he tries to practice walking like John Wayne) are shown from the earlier movie.

Ebert admitted, “Most of the biggest laughs, for me, came from Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest, as the senator and his wife. Hackman's senator is weathering a crisis (his closest colleague has just died in bed with an underage prostitute), and thinks maybe meeting his new in-laws will appease his right-wing constituents by promoting family values.”

Dianne Wiest, who sees and understands more than her husband but spoils him, reads the situation in South Beach quicker, but goes with the flow.

“The Birdcage” is the first time Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who helped define improvisational comedy in the 1950s, have worked together on a movie. What mostly shines from their work here is the dialogue, like when the senator’s daughter, trying to tell the situation in the best possile way, explains that South Beach is “about two minutes from Fisher Island, where Jed Bush lives.” Or when Armand looks at the crowd at his nightclub and whispers to the maître d’, “Free coffee for the Kennedys.”

This is a classic comedy that everyone should see. You will absolutely love this movie, especially with the chemistry from Williams and Lane. Even though Williams wasn’t gay, he really did an amazing and convincing job here. For instance, look at the evolution of dance that he does in about a minute, but ends with saying to keep it all inside. That is one of the funniest moments in here. Check it out and having an enjoyably laughing time.

Even though we started with a comedy, next week we will look at an emotionally sad movie in “Pride Month.”