THE IMITATION GAME

(Morten Tyldum, 2014)

A film where the subject is so intriguing that despite a somewhat bungled execution, the final product is still engrossing and utterly watchable.
A biopic of sorts, focusing on Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch, excellent but operating well within his comfort zone of twitchy aspergers sufferers) during the years of WW2 when he worked at Bletchley Park attempting to break the Enigma code. The film goes into a fair amount of detail about exactly what was involved in that process - Turing's attempts to create a computer which would be able to process quickly enough to work out the code vs his colleagues more old-fashioned efforts at cryptography - while also highlighting his social unease and habit of irritating everyone around him with his superiority and inability to understand basic politeness.
There is a framing device - Turing's arrest in 1950s Manchester for homosexual acts, which would lead to hormone therapy and his eventual suicide - and also a series of flashbacks to a key relationship with his first love at boarding school, and a voiceover which it transpires is Turing telling his story to a police detective, making it all feel a little overstuffed.
There are nice distractions - Keira Knightley is good as Joan Clarke, a colleague and fleeting fiancé, while Mark Strong and Charles Dance are both perfectly cast as Government suits, as is Matthew Goode as the perfect opposite of Turing (charming, smooth, at ease with himself) with whom he must learn to co-exist. It is handsome, has a few nice gags, and is an interesting study in how some of the elements which make Hollywood dramas and biopics so dreadfully predictable and cringeworthy can also be the moments that work, the scenes that move you. The potency of cheap, easy drama, as it were. The eureka moment, for example. The scene where Turing learns of the death of his schoolboy crush. His hamfisted proposal to Joan, and their bitter split.
Jostling alongside all of this are a few interesting ideas about intelligence and responsibility, chief among them perhaps the notion that it is right and in the best interest of all that scientists make decisions for the rest of us about life and death, based purely upon statistics. This is the great fear and paranoia upon which a million sci-fi stories have been based: that the scientists think they know better than us, the bovine herds living oblivious to the way the world works, and that they will ultimately make a decision which will kill or save us all.

BEGIN AGAIN

(John Carney, 2013)

Carney returns - sort of - to the winning formula he chanced upon in the modern classic that is Once, creating another not-quite-romance of two lost characters who find and save one another through the healing power of music.
Ruffalo is a down-on-his-luck A&R man and producer who, on the day when he has been fired from the label he co-founded, drunkenly chances upon singer-songwriter Knightly in a Greenwich village bar, falls in love with her song and suggests she sign with him. She is there after being dumped by her long-term boyfriend (Adam Levine) who has been propelled to sudden rock stardom by the inclusion of a song in a hit movie, leaving her behind as he changes and sells out. Rejected by his old label, Ruffalo suggests they make an album live in a variety of famous Manhattan locations, allowing Carney to shoot the city in all its summertime glory, while Knightly and band run through a series of catchy Gregg Alexander tunes on rooftops, subway platforms and in central Park..
Along the way, of course, there is growth, and healing, and a few good gags (James Corden responsible for many of them). It is poppy and light, and yet Carney insures that there is some consideration of the issues central to art; self-expression, authenticity, the impact of success.  Knightly remains true to her music throughout and ultimately rejects the chance of romantic rapprochement after realising that her ex feels differently about the importance of songs, and a coda suggests that her way will ultimately prove successful too. Meanwhile Ruffalo is redeemed by finding new music to love (the original title of the film was the fitting Can a Song Save Your Life?) which unites him with his estranged wife and daughter.
It is nicely shot to make a pin-sharp New York look fantastic, the cast are perhaps a bit classier than it deserves, and it is strangely resonant in its low-key tackling of some of the ideas and issues central to most everyday lives. Most importantly, it understands music, how we feel and feel about and experience music, how important it is, how musicians live surrounded by it.

A DANGEROUS METHOD

(David Cronenberg, 2011)

Theres not much trace of what most would see as typical Cronenberg in A Dangerous Method. No body horror, few disturbing ideas, no violence, either physical or psychological. Neither is this mor of the arthouse pulp of his recent collaborations with Viggo Mortensen - Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. Instead it seems far more representative of the work of its screenwriter, Christopher Hampton. Adapted from his play, "The Talking Cure", it is a classy, largely tasteful, very serious, literate and intelligent, earnest historical drama. There are flashes of Cronenberg; the subject matter allows for some investigation into the nature of insanity, and the sadomasochism in the sex scenes is made slightly edgy by virtue of bring shot in exactly the same, straightforward manner as everything else here. Cronenberg opts for a sober, classical style which verges on anonymous but remains handsome and appealingly slick throughout. An underrated quality of Cronenberg as a director is the brilliance of his storytelling, and he retains that ability here; transforming a slightly stagey, extremely talky piece into a compulsively watchable drama.
Hamptons screenplay helps, with some sparkling exchanges between it's principals. Michael Fassbinder and Mortensen play Freud and Jung in a story about their relationship and the crucial role played in it by a patient of Jungs, a hysterical young Russian Jew (Keira Knightley) who becomes his first great success, then his lover, and then a protege of Freud's in Vienna. Knightly is embarrassing, frankly, during the early scenes which depict her in the throes of hysteria - gurning, panting, feverishly working her underbite in the most contrived and "acted" manner imaginable. She grows into the part and is better later on as a mature woman with regrets and internal conflict. Fassbinder is the lead and as excellent as ever: believably intelligent, powerfully conflicted and finally bruised and tested by his experiences. Mortensen, meanwhile, portrays Freud nicely as a complex mixture of vanity, intellect, insecurity and charisma. The scenes shared by the two men fairly crackle with tension and intellectual excitement. For all that, this would be a thoroughly dry, cold pleasure were it not for the suprising power of the love story which gives the film its emotional climax.
Even so, it is quite dry, exercising the mind more than the heart. But then that isn't an entirely bad thing in a cinematic culture as dumbed-down as today's.