Hello, and welcome to my first dispatch from the 2014 Lone Star International Film Festival. I had to recuse myself from the opening film Virtuosity because I’m in the movie, but Eddie Brown saw the movie in my place, and he’ll have his report later. Thanks, Eddie.
The festival moved from Bass Hall to the Modern Art Museum late Wednesday night for The Imitation Game, a movie that plays uncannily like The Social Network with British accents and Nazis. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the mathematician who pioneered computer science in the 1940s when he was enlisted by the British government to crack the Enigma code used to encrypt German war messages. Someday, I’d like to see Cumberbatch play a smooth, charming guy who has lots of friends, but he sure can play the crap out of brilliant loners like Turing. The Imitation Game is a great showcase for him, and he is furious, awkward, self-contained, and tormented in his depiction of Turing’s secretiveness. The real-life Turing had good reason to be secretive — he was homosexual at a time when that was illegal in Britain. After the war, Turing’s sexuality was found out, and he was punished via chemical castration. The movie gets into this last part, though it shies away from the nastiest side effects of the hormone therapy. Much like The Social Network, the movie’s basically about an antisocial genius driven by a lost love; you don’t learn until late why Turing names his code-breaking machine “Christopher,” but you can probably guess. I’m guessing that this would be quite a bit less compelling without Cumberbatch’s performance, but that’s more than reason enough to see The Imitation Game.
(Another reason would be Keira Knightley’s supporting turn as Joan Clarke, a fellow code-breaker who agreed to marry Turing and act as his beard. This would be the third strong Keira Knightley performance I’ve seen this year. The second one is in Laggies, which I reviewed this week and opens today at AMC Grapevine Mills and AMC Parks at Arlington. It’s a lot of fun.)
From gay men, we move to lesbians and a perfectly charming palate cleanser of a movie in Life Partners. Leighton Meester plays a lesbian named Sasha whose straight best friend Paige (Gillian Jacobs) suddenly meets a doctor named Tim (Adam Brody) and agrees to marry him, leaving Sasha to confront the reality that she’s 29 years old, has no serious relationship, works a receptionist job that she hates, and isn’t sure whether she still wants to pursue her childhood goal of being a musician. Susanna Fogel’s comedy started out as a short play in which Paige promised never to get married as long as her gay friends couldn’t, but then went back on that promise once a prospective husband appeared. This plotline was taken out because gay marriage has become a reality in so many states so quickly. It’s a tribute to the filmmakers’ craft that the movie hardly seems to suffer for it. The cast works very well together (augmented by Gabourey Sidibe and Kate McKinnon), and the movie gives us a sense of how inconvenient it is for Sasha being relegated to third wheel. There’s also lots of little moments that sing, like when Paige and Tim drive away from a double date and mutually bitch about Sasha’s choice of girlfriends (consistently younger and living with their parents). LSIFF partnered with Q Cinema in bringing this to the festival. If only Q Cinema could bring in movies this starry every month!
My Thursday night ended with X/Y, a slackly paced and confusing multi-character drama set in New York by Ryan Piers Williams. The movie is broken up into chapters bearing the names of its various characters, including a screenwriter (Williams) who walks out on his longtime girlfriend (America Ferrera) after she admits to cheating on him, the girlfriend’s bed-hopping best friend (Melonie Diaz) with a spending addiction, and the writer’s Australian best friend (Jon Paul Phillips). This script badly needs workshopping; we’re plunged into the middle of a domestic fight without context, and things get no clearer as the movie wears on. When someone tells Ferrera’s character, “Mark’s a good guy. He loves you,” we never receive any evidence that either of those things is true. It feels like the movie’s out to reveal information about these people slowly, only it never quite gets around to the task. The fuzzy character work sinks a nice cast (including Dree Hemingway, Amber Tamblyn, and Common), and Williams makes a big mistake casting himself in one of the principal roles. He’s not near as good as the talent around him. Well, the festival is still in its early stages. I’m sure I’ll see better stuff in the coming days.
