They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don’t They?
The Toronto Film Festival—Part III: The Imitation Game Jumps Out Ahead
By J. Don Birnam
September 22, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Unlike festivals with award juries like Sundance and Cannes, TIFF prides itself in being the people’s festival, and the people’s choices come out on top. Students of the Oscars, not to speak of voting theories in political science, will tell you that populist coronations usually lead to a predictable result: unobjectionable candidates tend to emerge to the top. While TIFF doesn’t employ the preferential ballot, which rewards broad consensus even more than a straight-up majority vote, the fact that everyone and anyone that attends a screening can and does vote for the winner assuredly results in movies receiving prizes that would not necessarily do so if the award were selected by critics or other people in the film industry.
On top of all of this is the date change of the Oscars. Up until 2004, they were held in late March. Then, for various reasons mostly relating to ratings, the Academy moved the Oscar telecast up to late February. The implications of this change are momentous and cannot be overstated. The obvious implication is that it gives voters less chance to see all the nominated movies - this likely means that popular movies, i.e. well known quantities that have done well with either critics or audiences, will benefit. Voters won’t have time to see smaller, more obscure movies and push them across.
More important for the purposes of today’s column is the fact that the date change made late summer/early fall festivals such as TIFF more relevant. The reason is simple: again, Oscar voters are humans with jobs and much to do. It is natural that, given less time to view all the potentially award-worthy movies, they will look for signals in the movie world for what’s good and what’s not.
So, let’s put two and two together. TIFF rewards popular, unobjectionable choices because the award is voted on by the broad audience. TIFF is more relevant to the Academy Awards because voters are looking for signals earlier than they used to be. All of this is a very long way of explaining that TIFF’s People’s Choice Award is a very strong indicator of where the Best Picture winds are blowing - at the very least when it comes to nominations.
Thus, since 2008, the following movies have won the highest prize at TIFF: Slumdog Millionaire (also won Best Picture); Precious (Best Picture nominee); The King’s Speech (also won Best Picture); Where Do We Go Now? (No significant Oscar noise); Silver Linings Playbook (Best Picture nominee); and 12 Years a Slave (also won Best Picture). That’s an impressive batting average.
This year, of course, the top prize went to The Imitation Game, the semi-biopic about Alan Turing - nominally exploring his sexuality but in reality mostly focused upon his quest to crack the German Enigma machine during World War II.
Before reviewing the film (which I will do with as few spoilers as possible, but be warned that general thematic spoilers will abound), let’s consider what this means for the Best Picture race.
Prior to TIFF, as I wrote, we had essentially one serious contender that had been seen and vetted, and that was Boyhood. Now we have another serious contender. Will it win? It’s impossible to say. The movie is, like Silver Lining Playbook, The King’s Speech, and Slumdog Millionaire, completely unobjectionable. No one can seriously dislike it, it makes you feel good about humanity and yourself, it has flawed characters overcoming long odds, and you are rooting for essentially everyone in the movie to succeed. The formula is tried and true and has time and time again resulted in Best Picture wins.
But a lot, of course, depends on what is to come. There are many movies that haven’t been seen by critics or voters - Gone Girl, Unbroken, and Interstellar come to mind - but those movies have already problems. Gone Girl and Interstellar are not likely to be universally appealing, crowd pleasing movies, and their directors (David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, respectively) have been consistently shunned by the Academy. Unbroken is more a feel-good movie but I fear that its extremely late release date of December will doom it like that date has doomed a lot of movies since the date change, including Zero Dark Thirty and The Wolf of Wall Street in recent years.
So, can The Imitation Game win Best Picture? It most certainly can, given the way the field is shaping up right now. But that doesn’t mean that it will win and it certainly does not mean that it should win.
Here’s why.
The Imitation Game is, in most aspects, a good movie, and in some aspects it is even a great movie. Great is, for example, Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the troubled hero, tormented by his sexuality and a tragedy in his past, motivated by his desire for perfection but hampered by his weak interpersonal relationships, and, most likely, shadowed by the specter of some form of mild autism. Cumberbatch immerses himself in the character in ways that few actors have done this year, delivering raw emotion, truthful sentiment, and fiery passion from scene to scene. Cumberbatch has quickly risen as a bona fide star and a fantastic actor, and I expect he will get his first Best Actor nomination for this flawless performance.
Cumberbatch is supported by a talented cast that holds its own well despite being overshadowed by the lead character. Keira Knightley, in her second impressive role this year after Begin Again, plays the lone female amongst the group of cryptographers trying to crack the Enigma machine during World War II. Long gone are Keira’s pouty faces and mopey eyes. She plays a much more nuanced character - the rock that keeps Turing in place at his most desperate, and inspires him. Indeed, she plays a pivotal role in his life, and Knightley does not disappoint. Finally, Matthew Goode plays Turing’s nemesis-turned-ally, and provides an intellectual counterbalance to Turing’s genius and imperviousness.
Also strong are most technical aspects of the war. The music, by Alexander Desplat - long overdue an Oscar after receiving nominations for such films as The Queen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zero Dark Thirty - is exquisite, and always strikes the right chord scene-to-scene. The film also uses stylized cinematography in the few “live” war scenes it portrays - a dark, moody and vaporous lighting that respectfully conveys the horrors and devastation of the war, and that separates the shoots from the rest of the action. The director also used an off-hue for the flashbacks of Turing’s childhood, a more pale yellow/green tone that also serves the movie well and helps the viewer along subtly.
And then, of course, we have the director himself, the acclaimed Morten Tyldum. Oh wait, no one has ever heard of him. Well, like Michel Hazanavicius (the Artist) before him, this name is bound to become a household utterance amongst Oscar watchers. He’s Norwegian, and this is only his fourth feature film. I honestly had not heard of the other three. But that probably means that he has as good a chance as any with the Academy, which has shown a penchant time and time again to reward lesser known directors over more acclaimed artists.
But, and you knew the but was coming, the Imitation Game is - like most populist movies of its type - weakest at its story. (The average Oscar voter, of course, would argue that the story is the strongest part of the movie.) To be clear, the story is moving, compelling, interesting, and had to be told, not just because of the amazing heroics of the Enigma code breakers, but because of the horrific things that happened to Turing throughout his life because of his homosexuality. The movie in toto, an epopee to the genius that was long overdue, is important in that sense.
More problematic, however, are some of the ways in which the story is told. There are gaps and contrivances that the more cynical amongst us are bound to notice (but that should not necessarily detract from enjoying the movie). Turing’s complicated relationships with his work colleagues appear to be a focal point of the plot - they don’t like him and he doesn’t care much for them - until it is not. With the blink of a film reel frame, all of a sudden the relationship thaws and everyone works together. The lack of continuity there takes you out of the movie ever so briefly.
A similar problem exists with respect to how the movie handles Turing’s homosexuality. It is a subtle theme throughout, but when it gets explored in depth towards the end, it is done quickly and almost as an afterthought, leaving you to wonder whether the filmmakers don’t trust the audience to be mature enough to want to learn about this topic.
And (semi spoiler alert) the worst part of all is the Eureka moment of the film - when Turing has the inspiration that allows him to finally crack Enigma. The trick is so obvious as to be visible the moment it is introduced in the plot about 45 minutes prior to the discovery, and so stupidly simple that anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics will spot it immediately when it is mentioned.
Again, the filmmakers are probably wiser than I am - explaining to audiences the intricacies of these mathematical machinations is challenging enough as it is, and adding more to it would have probably made the movie more inaccessible to audiences. Given that this is a story that has to be told, it is always a conundrum to determine what the best approach is here. Does the filmmaker stick with the difficult scenes risking that it will turn audiences away, as it happened with 12 Years A Slave, or does the filmmaker turn it all into fluff and joy so as to draw audiences in, as the people behind Argo did? The Imitation Game people went for the latter choice. I can’t necessarily blame them, but I personally find that choice less rewarding than the former.
All in all, however, The Imitation Game is a solid movie, one that I would gladly see again, and it will make a worthy Best Picture nominee (should it get there, as I expect it likely will). I would not give it the top prize.
The Imitation Game is set to be released commercially in the United States on November 21st, the Friday before Thanksgiving.