Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Director Lorene Scafaria (middle) with actors Steve Carell and Keira Knightley

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD            C                    

USA  Singapore  Malaysia  Indonesia  (101 mi)  2012  ‘Scope d:  Lorene Scafaria

Another end of the world, apocalyptic fantasia, which are all the rage nowadays, usually offering *a big setting* to cover up for surprisingly banal human interest stories, and this one written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, is no exception.  Certainly one problem is that the risks that used to represent indie films, both in subject matter and casting choices, have been replaced by standard, Hollywood formats that are simply cheaper and less expensive to make.  Fewer risks means more conventionally safe choices, like the casting decisions to star the ever downbeat Steve Carell, once again playing a somewhat embittered, anti-social character with few friends, and Keira Knightley as the more gregarious, overly friendly neighbor, where the two bump into one another with only a matter of days left on earth, as an approaching asteroid is expected to collide, all but guaranteeing the end of life on earth.  But this bit of news is treated comically, where Carell’s wife runs out of the car upon hearing the news, as she can’t wait another second to leave him.  Television news updates remind us of the planet’s impending doom, where airports, railways, and other needed services quickly shut down, where rioters and looters fill the streets, causing mayhem, but Carell barely flinches, continuing to lead his miserablist life exactly as he did before.  Where’s the fun in that?  While there may be a few scenes that reach for some dramatic moment, Carell and Knightley barely scratch the surface in delivering any degree of emotional complexity.  And therein lies the problem, if the stars of the film are known entities, where the audience sees them in another familiar role where they continue to play themselves, it’s hard to believe them as anyone else, which this storyline most desperately needs.  Fresh faces would have helped, but the film would likely have remained unfunded without the Hollywood star power. 

There are quirky moments of clever writing, where inventive set-ups or unexpectedly off-beat characters might have energized the film, like the sequence at Friendly’s Restaurant, still open for business while everything else is closed, where the loosey-goosey atmosphere of exotic drinks, affectionately friendly wait staff, open pot smoking, and an everpresent conga line turns into a delightful end of the world orgy sequence, which really only gets started when our more straight-laced couple flees the scene in disgust.  One can imagine Thomas Hayden Church in the role, and he would not be running out the door.  It is precisely this mainstream element of moral conservatism that ruins the movie, as the film itself, and especially Carell, take themselves so seriously that it is nearly entirely personality free.  So the film isn’t half as much fun as it was originally intended to be.  Failing miserably is an early party sequence where Carell’s friends try to hook him up with an attractive girl, Melanie Lynskey, but he’s too self-absorbed to notice or care.  Instead, the focus becomes how absurdly ridiculous the party is itself, where since it’s the end of the world, people break out into shooting heroin, “Oh, I want to do heroin to Radiohead.”  In an out of the blue moment, Carell finds Knightley crying outside his windowsill, where she throws her arms around him when he asks if everything is all right, where he offers temporary consolation for her break-up with a dumbheaded boyfriend.  But as the streets rage out of control with more services shutting down, Carell grows ever more reclusive and morose, as he literally has nobody, which is a depressing way to spend your final days.  What alters this tailspin is Knightley actually giving him several months worth of misdirected mail, one of which is a plea to see him from an old high school girlfriend.  This sets into motion a new chain of events, as this gives him a targeted goal, along with Knightley who misses her family.

Leaving the flaming streets behind, Carell and Knightley embark on a road trip together, but of course, as there’s no gas stations open, they don’t get very far.  Not to worry, as William Peterson, in a hilarious cameo, stops to pick them up in his truck, telling them the entire story of his life en route, which takes a sudden unexpected turn that is among the best moments of the film.  The rest is a series of what are supposed to be kooky or eccentric moments together, where they get arrested by a zealously over-ambitious officer (Bob Stephenson), run into an over-controlling survivalist (Derek Luke), and then go on a house hunting chase where they continually seek out people in upscale mansions or expensive estates which, if no one is at home, they can use as their short-term living quarters.  This bit of pretense is not lost on the audience, as while the world is coming to an end, where water and electric power are in short supply, these two are living in an aristocratic style of luxury, showing little to no regard to the actual day to day horrors of staying alive, where people around them are likely already dying in droves, but instead they’re lost in a dreamworld about how to spend their final days, as if planning a vacation, wondering how they might want to fill their final hours, checking off activities as if they were passengers on a cruise ship.  While the director tries to keep it personal, where the story is and has always been between these two people, using the dire apocalyptic surroundings simply for a diversion, the lack of spark between the two leads never adds up.  This script itself likely attracted this cast, as it’s not without merit, while the cinematographer is David Gordon Green’s longtime friend Tim Orr, so there’s plenty to like, but the direction itself never rises to the occasion, maintaining its position as an occasionally offbeat, but overly predictable mainstream Hollywood movie disguised as an indie film.   

The Imitation Game

Alan Turing (left) and actor Benedict Cumberbatch

Alan Turing at age 16

THE IMITATION GAME           B                     
Great Britain  USA  (114 mi)  2014  d:  Morton Tyldum            Official site

Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.

Morton Tyldum is the Norwegian director of Headhunters (Hodejegerne) (2011), a stylish crime thriller running on high octane that treats the audience to a savagely vicious world of unleashed villainy, while here he exposes one of the dark secrets of Great Britain’s past, their ill-advised persecution of the one man that nearly single-handedly invented a machine that decrypted the German messages in World War II and helped the Allies win the war.  While most of us didn’t read about this in our history books, that’s because the information remained classified for the next 50 years.  The subject of the film is the great British mathematician Alan Turing, a brilliantly educated gay man of genius (modestly comparing himself poorly to the academic exploits of Einstein in the film) who devised a number of groundbreaking techniques for breaking German codes.  Winston Churchill said Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany, where historians now believe he may have helped advance the end of the war by two years and in the process save 14 million lives.  Despite his status as a war hero (which was not recognized publicly due to continued government secrecy), Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, which remained against the law in Britain until decriminalization in the mid 60’s.  In something out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), as an alternative to prison, he accepted what amounts to chemical castration by taking female hormone injections, dying two years later at the age of 41 from self-inflicted suicide by cyanide poisoning.  It took until 2009 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make an official government apology for “the appalling way he was treated,” while the Queen also granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.  Based on the Andrew Hodges book, Alan Turing:  The Enigma, which he began writing in 1977, released in 1983, it’s interesting that the book was written by a mathematician, currently a Research Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University, where his interest developed from his similar background, but also from his participation in the gay liberation movement of the 1970’s.  

Despite his notoriety today, Turing remained a mysterious figure during his lifetime, a man shrouded in secrecy, where MI6 Secret Intelligence Agent Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) points out he would have been a perfect candidate as a spy, telling him he was exactly the man he hoped he would turn out to be when he recruited him.  The film is told during three periods of his life, his teenage schooldays, wartime service, and his final years in the early 1950’s, continually moving back and forth in time, opening with the scratchy recording of the 1939 radio broadcast of King George VI declaring war on Germany, which is the same speech from Tom Hooper’s Academy Award winning picture THE KING’S SPEECH (2010).  As that film relied upon a superb performance by Colin Firth as the stuttering King, this does the same with Benedict Cumberbatch as the brilliant Turing, where what both films have in common is they are handsome, well-made, informative, dignified, yet also exceedingly bland.  While this is a highly unconventional subject matter, the film itself couldn’t be more safely conventional, where any reference to homosexuality has been so deeply eliminated and hidden from view, mentioned only through coded references, that this could easily pass for a Disney film.  In other words, it helps if you’re familiar with the subject matter ahead of time, as there is little mention of actually “being” gay.  This is a far cry from the dreaded anguished realms of Hell described by impeccably educated, Catholic-bred, fellow Brit Terence Davies in his intensely personal ode to his hometown of Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008), a much more emotionally devastating work where he bashes the Catholic Church for instilling in him an overwhelming sense of fear and guilt while growing up gay, eventually rejecting the church altogether, where he admittedly now lives an asexual lifestyle.  Turing, unfortunately, never survived to appreciate the benefits of his own tiresome efforts, where he basically invented an initial model for what we now commonly call computers.  Had he survived the socially repressive era of the 50’s, he would be lauded and celebrated on a number of fronts today, and while hardly the definitive Alan Turing film, leaving out huge gaps in his life, hopefully this is not the last word on the subject. 

Certainly the main problem with the film is the detached unlikability of the main character as he works in near isolation at Bletchley Park, a secret British cryptography unit at the Government Code and Cypher School that was formed to crack Germany’s Enigma machine code, where despite the horrors that are foisted upon him early in life, including being brutally bullied by others at school, he remains unsympathetic throughout because of the routine way he’s so dismissive of others,  His callous disregard for other people, particularly during wartime when nerves are already on edge from nightly bombings, is beyond offensive and near psychotic.  While the film attributes it to how much smarter he is than others, his hubris and extreme arrogance are symptomatic of deeper psychological problems that are left unexplored.  Instead, the film counterbalances his sneering coldness with a warmhearted figure in Keira Knightley as his sole friend, Joan Clarke, a woman he hires because of her own brilliance in solving puzzles.  But she provides all the social etiquette that he’s incapable of, which includes graciously smiling and being friendly, while Turing criticizes and belittles the ineffectiveness of his coworkers while continually alienating them.  His indifference is reminiscent of Stephen Hawking’s portrayal in The Theory of Everything (2014), who is seen in a much more positive light through the loving eyes of his wife whose book was adapted for the film.  Except for those private moments when Turing is seen with Clarke, he is almost exclusively alone, though the person having the greatest impact on his life was his only friend at Sherborne School, Christopher Morcom (Jack Banner), his first love, where the two were the smartest students in class, but his untimely death from tuberculosis shattered Turing’s religious faith, sparking a career as a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist, but also the idea of whether a machine might contain the intelligence of a human being, where he named his code-breaking machine after Christopher, while also inventing the “Turin test,” or “Imitation game,” a series of questions designed to determine whether you were speaking to a person or a “thinking” machine.  Near the end of his life Turing is portrayed as a lone eccentric, having lost all his family and friends, where all that’s left is Christopher looming inside his apartment taking up an entire wall, like a place of worship, or the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the accompanying music by Alexandre Desplat might actually be described as exalting.  Turing’s life was portrayed earlier by Derek Jacobi in a made-for-television movie called BREAKING THE CODE (1996), and who can forget Dougray Scott as the tortured codebreaker in a fictionalized version, with Kate Winslet and Jeremy Northram along for window dressing in ENIGMA (2001), but this Hollywood version with Cumberbatch offering the intellectualized, award-worthy performance will have a much greater impact.  It’s been a banner year for science in movies, with portrayals of real life scientists Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking, and let’s not forget the fictionalized NASA pilot turned space traveler Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar (2014).   

Begin Again

John Carney (left) with Mark Ruffalo on the set

 

BEGIN AGAIN           B+            
USA  (104 mi)  2013  d:  John Carney              Official site

Oddly enough, the beginning of this film plays out much like the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2012), where a singer performs alone to a relatively disinterested audience in the dark smoky confines of a small club in the East Village of New York, including a clever somewhat literary use of flashback sequences to show what led up to that moment, where the heart of the film draws a line in the sand between studio processed music and a voice of authenticity, where a common theme in both is refusing to sell out to a faceless corporate music industry that for all practical purposes wants to reshape your songs in their image.  Despite the fact you’re the artist and creator, they’re the ones that end up lining their pockets, earning nine dollars out of every ten.  That tradition is called capitalism, and many an artist has lost their soul trying to make it in the crass and exploitive atmosphere that is the music business.  Made by the director of ONCE (2006), which was turned into a hit Tony award-winning musical on Broadway in 2012, winning eight Tony awards including Best Musical, John Carney was a former bass player in the Irish rock group The Frames in the early 90’s, whose lead singer Glen Hansard starred in his earlier film as the writer and singer of most of the songs, where the beauty of the film was paralleling a budding personal relationship with the collaborative artistic process of making music, turning it into a joyful and uplifting experience, much as Craig Brewer did in HUSTLE & FLOW (2005), two films that thrive on authentic atmosphere and inspiring performances, turning into exhilarating musical love fests.  Carney again features a similar storyline, where he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the music business, which has undergone drastic changes in the last decade, where the prevalence of artists putting their own music out on YouTube or iTunes has altered the playing field, allowing the artists themselves instead of some record company to determine their own destiny.  This individualized shift in marketing has led to more intimate musical releases that are not burdened with a mass-produced sound that makes every song sound the same.  While the songs here are not on the same level as those used in ONCE, they are instead far more toned down to reflect a quiet softness of the female character, nonetheless there’s an authentic degree of sweetness and sincerity from Keira Knightley’s performance (that includes singing her own songs) to generate appeal. 

Carney, who started out making music videos for The Frames, seems to specialize in creating “moments of intimacy” both in the musical numbers and in the developing personal relationships, where the entire film seems to be a collection of small and often forgotten moments that people have a tendency to overlook, but here they’re magnified into magical realms through a healing power of music that comes to personify Carney’s area of expertise.  The film actually starts out rather amateurishly, as the songs are poorly lip-synched, which causes a needless distraction, while Knightley as Greta is forced unwillingly to sing one of her songs onstage, where there’s little to no appeal in her performance.  Simultaneously, Mark Ruffalo as Dan the A & R man, a guy responsible for finding and signing new music talent, is a hard corps alcoholic whose life is tailspinning away from him, already separated from his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener), a musical journalist, and their teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), where in the early scenes he’s little more than a disgrace and an embarrassment, where in no time at all he’s kicked to the curb from the indie record label that he founded, spending the rest of the day drinking his troubles away.  If all of this sounds a bit pat and formulaic, it is, even uncomfortably so.  But not to worry, as that’s about to change when Carney rewinds the tape back to Greta’s first nightclub performance where Dan is seen sitting at the bar, and in his state of inebriation he hears something altogether different, which suddenly takes shape onscreen even though it’s only playing in his head, where like Disney’s FANTASIA (1940) other instruments suddenly appear onstage and start playing themselves, adding drums, cello, and piano, even a violin, where this sheepishly awkward performance that everyone else hears suddenly develops a sound.  Dan blurts out his ideas that he wants to record her, handing out his business card (where he was fired), where he has to admit he’s dead drunk and that his life is in such turmoil that it would be hard for anyone to take him seriously, but he’s emphatically optimistic about her song.  The urgency of his intentions are met with appropriate suspicion and disbelief, as who would believe that guy?  Fortunately in the modern era we can Google people’s names and Greta discovers he was an influential force in the music industry, actually reading out loud what it says about him when they meet the next day.  Dan, however could care less about the past, and is a rush of enthusiasm about the possibilities of their future working together. 

The backstory with Greta is far more intriguing, as she was professionally and romantically involved with fledgling rock star Dave Kohl (Adam Levine from Maroon 5) for the past five years, co-writing his songs, where his career took off after one of his songs was featured in a hit movie.  As he cashes in on his success, Greta gets left behind and cheated on, and despite coming to New York to be with him, she was on her way out of town until Dan’s proposition stopped her in her tracks, as he wants to record an entire album of her songs, but they’ll have to do it on the fly, as they don’t have access to a recording studio.  Out of nothing, things start to materialize, as they decide to record songs in various outdoor New York street locations, hiring a bunch of student nobodies that are thrilled to be working anywhere outside the classroom, borrowing a few seasoned musicians from artists that Dan helped along the way, including rapper CeeLo Green as Troublegum, whose hilarity is only surpassed by a surprising humanity in his character.  The street locations elevate the film into rare territory, becoming an impressionistic tribute to New York itself which is impressively rhapsodized in music, much like Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN (1979), saturating the screen in a sumptuous glow of romanticism, wondrously shared through a playlist of their favorite songs from their iPods, heightening the film with a rapturous feeling of love in the air.  Most of the music is written by Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals, though Glen Hansard also contributed the first song recorded in an alleyway called “Coming Up Roses,” Keira Knightley - Coming Up Roses (Begin Again ... - YouTub YouTube (3:14), where the sequence of song recordings come together like the mad crescendo of Busby Berkeley numbers in FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933).  This rush of energy is the appeal of the film, as the initially dour and awkwardly uninteresting characters suddenly surge with a newfound belief in themselves, where their electrical connection is felt throughout the entire cast, becoming wonderfully infectious.  Carney has a marvelous eye for small, unembellished moments, as Dan tries to reconnect with his family, especially his aloof daughter Violet, where there are poignant, beautifully written scenes of Greta and Violet with Dan tagging along where he doesn’t even have to say a word, which is only magnified later when they all come together in a Beatles rooftop LET IT BE (1970) moment that feels spontaneously alive.  The film captures the joyous spirit of personal discovery, and while it’s bathed in musical romanticism, the overriding power is this unique emotional candor that thrives on the revelatory experiences of life itself.