Tropic Sprockets
The Imitation Game
KONK LIFE COLUMNIST
Despite a reserved “Masterpiece Theatre” tone and some ultra attentive enunciations, Swedish director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters) delivers an excellent portrait of the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game.”
Turing’s machine broke the Nazi war code during WWII. He saved thousands of lives and reportedly curtailed the war by at least two years. Because of his homosexuality, Turing was execrably and brutally treated after the war and sentenced to a chemical castration program, essentially de-evolving him into a human shell.
As Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch creates a tour de force of drama that is masterful and self contained. He is at once witty and shy, halting yet glib. As Turing, Cumberbatch becomes a frosty chameleon, quick with daring and sure in verbal cuts but ultimately frightened and at times frozen in terror by the evasive confrontation of other mortals.
During the beginning of the film, Turing’s interview by Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) is a jabbing and comical study in one-upmanship that rivals Monty Python. But all is not a volley of laughs. We see a young Turing (Alex Lawther) at school, paralyzed with complete terror as he is nailed under a wooden trap door. The depiction is very close to being buried alive; he kicks and claws to no avail.
Somehow, by sheer will, he survived the torment of others. His favorite saying, in paraphrase, is that people “enjoy violence because it gives them pleasure, but take away the pleasure and the act is left hollow.” The words serve him well. Turing gets a post at Bletchley Park as a cryptologist, in the hopes of breaking Enigma, the impossible German code. He is ruthless in his drive, firing many key members. He holds a formidable crossword contest.
Enter Joan Clarke, played with verve by Kiera Knightley who becomes Turing’s left, if not right-hand, second in command. Tyldum’s tight and poetic direction oscillates between the logician’s relentless puzzle graphing and the haunt of his romantically repressed past, even showing these two paths as irrevocably fused—a code within itself. In one scene, the Turing boy makes a declaration of love in encryption for Christopher (Jack Bannon). Turing rushes outside amid a huge crush of boys. Christopher never comes.
This scene combined with the previous mentioned floorboard scene is heart wrenching in anxiety and pathos, reminiscent of Alan Parker’s “Pink Floyd — The Wall” in its flavor of melancholy along with the bluntness of cruelty in children. One gets the definite feeling that although he is treated as “the other,” pursued, hunted as quarry by the morally judgmental Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) and disgustingly persecuted, Turing alone has the upper hand.
Like a Mark Zuckerberg or the cinematic fiction of a Julian Assange, Turing’s isolating and spacey tunnel vision is a filter that puts him one step ahead of the others. And perhaps in his final days, he managed it. Turing’s biographers, Andrew Hodges and David Leavitt, apparently suggest that Turing, faced with forced castration, took a bite of a poison apple in a re-creation of Snow White — his favorite fairy tale — forging a last stand of poetic mystery over the sadness of life.
Whatever the case, “The Imitation Game” is a fitting tribute to a man who lived by his own helix of humanity. Alan Turing was indeed a force of nature whose calculations won the war. If that was not enough, his graphed visions essentially produced what evolved into our modern computers. Turing emerges as a spirit-hero rising above convention, a logarithm ahead of moral insanity and pervasive ignorance.
Big Eyes
Director Tim Burton has created a hermetic world unique to himself. You will never find his suburbs in Wayne, New Jersey; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Baltimore, Maryland, or anywhere else on earth. As seen in films like “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood” and the animated “Frankenweenie,” Burton’s version of the American Dream and its symbols, notably the split level house, is idiosyncratic and primed for lunacy.
In “Big Eyes” one will find those same notes from the 1950s and ‘60s. Indeed, they are his hallmarks. The film details the true story of Margaret Keane, born as Margaret Doris Hawkins, known for her portraits done in the early 1960s of cherubic children with huge dark and pooling eyes that are as large as Siamese cats. The distinctive eyes are like rivers or dark marbles formed from the blood of burnt sienna. Among critics her paintings were labeled as cheap, pandering and kitschy in the worst way. Nevertheless she achieved iconic fame.
But nothing is easy. Margaret (Amy Adams) begins, stifled by a controlling husband that we never see but nonetheless can sense, given the conformist environment. The Burtonesque houses hover in the background like ominous mushrooms of pale gray and ivory bone. When she motors away with her daughter Jane (Delaney Raye) in tow, the screen’s palette becomes a terrain of brilliant yellows, sky blues and emerald greens. Here is the wife starting anew and heading for San Francisco, determined to paint.
During an outdoor art show, she meets the fast talking gadabout Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz). Margaret is swept by his charm and seeming worldliness even though his paintings lack character. Faced with a bitter custody battle, she agrees to hastily marry Walter. She paints incessantly. Walter goes to gallery after gallery with his own work but gets nastily rejected. On a whim, he brings Margaret’s “waifs” and gets art space in a nightclub. Through Walter’s ingratiating but frenzied salesmanship, her paintings get noticed.
One day during a showing, Walter lets it slip, that he in fact, is the painter. Margaret is aghast, but because the work is making money, she relents. The ruse of her husband Walter Keane as the artist is a dilemma that almost destroys Margaret. Waltz is terrific as the hyper, smarmy and ultimately psychotic Walter. Under Burton’s direction, what at first was once slick with affection is transformed into a petty, annoying and angry caw of a man, making a genuine American Gothic.
Adams too, does excellently as the interior and somewhat passive creator with a surreptitious feline intelligence. With her role as the scofflaw creator, Amy Adams subverts the stereotype of the 1960s housewife. “Big Eyes” is Tim Burton’s 1950s period film, showing a young woman of vision (however schmaltzy) striking against status quo and convention. The recognizable Burton elements are here:
There is a good scene in a grocery store showing all customers having “Keane Eyes” as Margaret picks up a Campbell’s soup can (in a tribute to Andy Warhol). And its scares you. Walter Keane is almost as pathological as Jack Torrance in “The Shining.” Like John Waters, all of Burton’s work is about odd people striking out to make their own eccentric path under the pastel weight of the ‘50s.
Here we have a genuine Margaret Scissorhands of a sort battling against a jealous alcoholic worthy of Poe. As Walter Keane, Christoph Waltz makes an frightening yet comical antihero and indeed, one to watch. Although we might have a nightmare before paradise once again, set against the backdrop of a vibrantly hued Honolulu, we also have the introverted but buoyant Margaret to show us the glee within the gloom.
Alas, in true Burton fashion, quirk always wins out: Walter Keene died in 2000, consumed by anger, bankrupt and alone, while Margaret still lives on at age 86, to paint another day.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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