Films: aren't they for enjoyment?

What I don’t like about most film reviewers is that they seem to emphasise originality above all other qualities. This means that they tend to value only those shows that have broken with tradition by doing something utterly different, like abandon plot, character or coherence. Sadly, in my view that means they end up doing something tediously the same: bore me to tears.

I cling to the outdated and banal notion that the cinema ought to be fun.

At the moment there seems to be a bit of fixation in Hollywood with to biopics about unusual and outstanding scientists.

That’s produced two highly entertaining films marked by some fine performances. I find Alan Turing exceptionally interesting. My admiration isn’t limited to his role in breaking the Germans’ Enigma code in World War 2, but is based at least as much on the thinking that prepared him for that work, and which he took further through it, on what has come to be known as the “Turing Machine.” That theoretical model of a fully automated, mechanical process underlies all modern computing.

And then there’s the bitter tragedy of his life. Hounded to his death by the police in a Britain that still had laws against homosexuality, to which it sacrificed one of its most original thinkers.

Turing with the boys of Hut 8.
One of whom happened to be a woman

A film has to limit its scope, and the biopic of Turing, The Imitation Game, focuses on the battle against Enigma and on the persecution of the homosexual, and does both things well. That produces a fine and highly watchable film, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the leading role, well supported by Keira Knightley. Its narrow focus does mean, on the other hand, that a great deal about this unusual man is left. Curiously, though, that very fact did spur me to tackle the biography, by Andrew Hodges, on which the film is based. Alan Turing: the Enigma gives a far more complete picture (well, yes, it’s a long book). It also explains where the phrase “the imitation game” comes from: Hodges uses it to describe Turing’s striving in the 1930s to appear to be someone he wasn’t.

The Theory of Everything does something slightly odd in the genre, by telling the story of a living scientist, in this instance Stephen Hawking. The performance of Eddie Redmayne in the lead role is outstanding; he contorts his face to try to look like someone suffering from Motor Neurone Disease to the point where at times I wondered how he could keep acting. And at other times whether I was really looking at Hawking.

Stephen and Jane.
In the short time before the MND struck

The film is based on the autobiography of Jane Hawking (brought to life by Felicity Jones), and tells the story of their life together from falling in love while Hawking was a postgraduate, to their divorce but continuing affection. It’s entertaining and well told. A good way to spend a couple of hours.

The French playwright Jean Giraudoux called one of his plays Amphytrion 38, on the grounds that he could count 37 previous treatments of the Greek myth of Amphytrion. On that basis, Ex Machina could probably be referred to as Pygmalion 99, though 99 may be a low estimate.

You know the story: a man (yes, it’s always a man), somehow fashions a woman (and, yes, she’s never particularly hard on the eyes). Then he falls in love with her and finds that she doesn’t entirely reciprocate his feelings, if she reciprocates them at all.

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina
making it clear you play at being a god at  your own peril

Ex Machina introduces some good twists and turns into that basic structure, and moves it into contemporary times – we’re talking Artificial Intelligence, curiously a notion dear to Alan Turning – rather than a statue into which a god breathes life. It also has an ingenious ending, which it approaches by sustained creepiness throughout, and all in a glorious setting.

And then finally there’s the film which even I have to admit is probably pretty rubbish, but which I enjoyed all the same. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I like sports films (as I like thrillers and court room dramas – all I have to see is police milling around with forensics experts in white suits, or lawyers going at each other hammer and tongs, to want to see more). 

Now most sports films follow one tried and tested formula: team doing appalling badly after suicide of star player/gaoling of manager/ghastly accident killing half the players (delete as applicable); new dynamic manager/fading star breaking from alcoholism/young player ignored by agents due to poor physique (delete as applicable) joins and the victories start to pile up; after a suspense-laden semi-final won in the last gasp of match time, the team qualifies for the final of the prestigious knock-out championship; in that final, against the favoured team of the year, it either wins in a nail-bitingly close encounter despite attempts to cheat by the opposing side, or is beaten in a nail-bitingly close encounter from which it emerges head held high and with honour resplendent.

Kevin Costner being thoughtful in Draft Day,
a film that requires little thought

Draft Day is nothing like that. First of all, it takes place within the space of less than a single day, thus preserving the classical unity of time (which, as I’ve said before, I rather like). If, like me, you know nothing about the process by which American football teams draft players from the College game, the film will teach you some quite intriguing lessons: it’s redolent of a slave market, which considering most of the players are black, is particularly poignant. I might add that I had a small and politically entirely incorrect smile when one black player announced “I’m going to be a Brown” (he was joining the Cleveland Browns), but I suspect that wasn’t an intentional joke.

What gives the film its entertainment value is the negotiating process in which the leading character, played by Kevin Costner, trades with other team managers the right to make different picks among the players on offer, in order to maximise what he sees as the benefit for his own club.

It’s a decidedly second – well, probably tenth – rate film, but I enjoyed it.

Joyless Jews, a victim and his torturer, breaking codes

The Israelis are extraordinarily good at making films that shine a flashlight into the corners of their existence. Prisoners of War (Hatufim) is several leagues better than the rather pedestrian Homeland that was based on it (the latter only relieved by Claire Danes’ performance as a CIA agent with mental health problems – but doesn’t even that begin to wear thin after the novelty’s gone?). 

As for Waltz with Bashir, it’s hard to imagine an enemy of Israel making such a searing indictment of the horror and shame of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon – and it also shows just how good animation can be if one only allows it to take on a profound and adult subject.

Now a film by an Israeli director, Rama Burshstein, has opened my eyes again, with Fill the Void. Burshstein is the first Orthodox Jew to have made a film for general distribution, and she’s merciless in the way she probes the life of an Orthodox (Haredi) community in Tel Aviv. What emerges is a harrowing picture, at least to the eyes of this Western outsider, of claustrophobia and denial of anything remotely resembling freedom of choice, above all to women. The community should naturally have the right to live its life as it wishes, but this sensitive film left me feeling “sooner you than me.”

Fill the void: powerfully grim and claustrophobic

Talking about merciless, the Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, seems at first to be just another study of the pitiless treatment of prisoners of war by their Japanese captors, on the Burma railway in the Second World War (you’ll remember, The Bridge of the River Kwai, and if you don’t, make a point of watching it, or watching it again, soon. It’s a classic.) It works on two time planes: the adult Eric Lomax, the Railway Man of the title, back in his native Scotland and obsessively interested in railways still, partly as a means of dealing with the effects of his wartime sufferings, and his younger incarnation, taken prisoner in Singapore and then brutalised by his captors. 

It’s no spoiler to tell you he survived: the film starts with his post-war existence.

Colin Firth as the Railway Man, appropriately in a train

The scenes of his later life are in many ways more interesting than those from Burma, since they give an insight into the effects of post traumatic stress, not just on him, but on his fellow survivors. The film is based on the real-life Lomax’s autobiography, and it isn’t strong on self-criticism, which makes the material on his courage under torture slightly less easy to take at face value. Nonetheless, the film takes a fascinating turn from the point that Lomax discovers that one of his tormentors is alive and atoning for his sins by acting as a tour guide back at the camp where torture had occurred, making the last part of the film more than good enough to justify sitting through the POW scenes that lead up to it.

And then there’s Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game.

Not enough has yet been said about Alan Turing. We tend to talk most about the work he did breaking the German Enigma code during World War Two. What we perhaps don’t appreciate enough is that the principles on which he based the machines which he built to crack the cypher formed the basis of computing as we now know it. As well as contributing to saving the world from potential Nazi domination, he therefore prepared it for the culture we now enjoy. And before you say “well, there’s not much to be thankful there then,” just remember that an awful lot of computing is highly beneficial, and the fact that the Tea Party or, indeed, the US Republicans generally, can make use of the internet for their own nefarious ends, is just the price we pay for a great enhancement to our lives generally.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing
with one of the machines that broke Enigma and launched modern computing

The other code that Turing broke was society’s rejection of homosexuality that had, in his time, barely begun to recede. It wasn’t until a great reforming Labour government came to power in Britain in the 1960s, that the law against homosexuality was repealed. Too late for Turing, who fell foul of that law viciously applied by men who couldn’t begin to appreciate the quality of his genius. The experience destroyed him.

Not the least quality of the film is its portrayal of one of the policemen and his gradually awakening horror at what he has, for initially completely different motives, found himself dragged into forwarding.

Good films, all three. Perhaps not out-and-out classics, but well worth a couple of hours or so. And, if you have a couple of hours to watch any of them, you’d be unlikely to find you’ve wasted your time.