Mind/Body: SELF/LESS

Self/Less starts with Ben Kingsley as a New York real estate magnate filled with regrets as he’s dying of cancer. It ends with Ryan Reynolds playing a rattled everyman puzzling over an existential mystery rapidly devolving into a chase-based thriller. They’re playing the same person. The connection between these two performances and the situations in which they find themselves hinge on a sci-fi hook. The movie gets some good heady tremors out of its body-swapping, mind-hopping’s occasionally fascinating disjunction. The two halves don’t quite make a whole, both within and outside the world of the film, which makes for a movie as interesting as it is flawed.

Kingsley’s performance is mannered, twitchy, moving deliberately and carefully through business dealings with an old partner (Victor Garber) and thwarted attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Michelle Dockery). All the while he’s struggling through choked coughing, a symptom, we’re to understand, of the terminal cancer eating away inside him. A suave bespectacled black market scientist (Matthew Goode) offers him a way out. Why not fake his death, get inside a whirling modified extra-magnetized CAT scan contraption, and transmit his mind into a younger body, held in stasis just waiting for a consciousness? It seems too good to be true, but worth a try. He wakes up as Ryan Reynolds, losing in the process the personality we saw before.

Here’s the central disjunction at work. Reynolds’ performance doesn’t match up with Kingsley’s. In a body swap scenario, shouldn’t we be able to peer into one actor’s face and see the other’s character? That’s not the case here, but Reynolds is doing somewhat interesting work, albeit of a different sort. He’s never looked more like a freshly birthed calf, stumbling with a dumbfounded look on his face as he emerges an old man in an unfamiliar younger body. At first he’s happy to be without the burden of his old life, suddenly healthy and vital again with unlimited resources offered by having a fortune carefully squirreled away for his new identity. But of course a problem quickly arises. He has seizures, hallucinations, and is prescribed pills to take until the side effects go away. Wouldn’t want his transplant to fail, after all. This isn’t a Freaky Friday or Face/Off switcheroo. There’s no going back.

This is of a piece with director Tarsem Singh’s usual interest in people inhabiting others’ lives and stories, through magic (Mirror Mirror), myth (Immortals), imagination (The Fall), or technobabble (The Cell). It’s also full of echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, with which it shares a central premise, if not its existential dread. But Self/Less is also Tarsem’s least visually interesting film, putting aside his usual go-for-baroque design for workmanlike thriller framing and mechanics. You can see flashes of his visual brilliance in the old man’s gold-plated apartment, and in the eerie plastic-draped makeshift medical center at which the operation takes place. But otherwise the screenplay by brothers Alex and David Pastor offers few opportunities for fantastical imagery beyond hallucinations that warp and distort, turning the picture into something like a wobbling bowl of gelatin filled with flash-frames.

There are interesting ideas here about the nature of identity, but also income inequality, especially as we see Kingsley’s extravagant lifestyle and learn the reason Reynolds had a body ready to be hijacked by a new man. Things aren’t as antiseptic as the mysterious underground doctor led them to believe. (What a shock.) But the film doesn’t dig into these headier ideas, content to let Reynolds adopt a vaguely pained expression as he’s forced to run, jump, punch, and shoot his way to a selfless conclusion. He picks up some sidekicks, a woman (Natalie Martinez) and her adorable daughter (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who operate as an externalized source for confusion and emotion he’s not allowed to express, and in the process become people much easier to root for.

I found myself trying to think around the blankness in the middle of what is otherwise a good idea. I kept looking to see flashes of Kingsley’s performance in Reynolds, but alas, I could not. A pivotal climactic scene requires an understanding of whether or not the old man’s mind is still operating, and, reader, I still didn’t know even after he said the answer out loud. This movie is a good example of an intriguing concept that never quite finds its footing. Tarsem directs smoothly and competently as the plot’s gears turn. But the whole thing comes up empty. I was interested, but never invested, as the distancing hollowness at its center grew.

Turing the Tide: THE IMITATION GAME

The Imitation Game runs through its biopic paces, reducing a Great Man’s life into a series of easily digestible Big Moments. That the true story it tells is of Alan Turing, a gay man whose life’s work had gone underreported because of prejudice, and because his crucial scientific breakthroughs partially responsible for defeating Hitler remained classified, lends it a degree of importance. Although, given the subject’s wide reporting since files were declassified, it’s not exactly breaking new research ground here. Besides, it’s a movie, one intended to interpret a good story into a satisfying entertainment at that. It’s a World War II picture about people crunching numbers on the home front that’s quietly amazed the war was won, at least in the intelligence arena, by a gay man, a woman, and a roomful of math whizzes.

Graham Moore’s screenplay moves along three parallel tracks. It follows young Turing (Alex Lawther), bullied at boarding school and dealing with the first glimmers of his genius and romantic stirrings. It follows a detective (Rory Kinnear) in the 1950s puzzling out Turing’s secrets. The track is destined to end in tragedy when Turing is outed and charged with indecency in accordance to UK law at the time. These fill in the biopic obligations, giving us childhood context and his sad end, but the most exciting track is the WWII stuff. There director Morten Tyldum makes a brisk historical thriller in which Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is tasked with cracking the Nazi Enigma code with a team of mathematicians, cryptographers, and spies (Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong). He recruits some fellow number crunchers, chief among them a brilliant young woman (Keira Knightley) kept out of the official inner circle by sexism.

It’s the kind of sanctimonious based-on-a-true-story film that’s pretty proud of itself for its historical importance, so much so the characters sound like they’ve already read the history books about their lives. It’s full of people simplifying and speechifying for our benefit, extolling the virtues of the Turing Machine while sneering at those who think it’s a waste of money as if it should’ve been obvious in the moment the future importance of the project. Elsewhere, characters say things like, “You can’t say you’re gay, Turing. That’s illegal.” Surely there’s a more subtle or elegant way of getting that information out there. It’s an overdose of explanation.

Turing narrates the entire picture, explaining the context of various incidents in his life, a way of getting inside the head of a character portrayed here as so full of egghead eccentricities he might as well have wandered in off the set of The Big Bang Theory. But a late scene reveals the voice over is a monologue he’s giving to a detective. Why he’d tell his life story there is beyond me. Maybe he’s filibustering. Cumberbatch delivers a clamped down performance so full of ticks and tricks that it’s scarcely believable as a real person. He’s a collection of biographical details never convincingly brought to life, perfect for a movie more interested in Big Moments and important monologues than building characters or crafting a gripping yarn.

But when the movie relaxes its need to explain the importance of its moment in history while following the build-a-biopic kit step by step, there’s some fine acting and some nervous tick-tock energy in its construction. Small moments of human interaction and wartime strategizing are often engaging. The actors are accomplished and, lead performance aside, have warm and lively likable energy. Knightley is the standout here, as a woman with a brilliant mind held back by a patriarchal system out to devalue her. When she shows up to apply for the job, she’s nearly turned away by a man who assumes she’s a lost secretary. Her sunny charm and intelligence give her scenes a heartbeat, much like Goode, Strong, and Dance (a good name for a Broadway law firm, by the way) breath sly grumpiness into stuffy writing.

Turing’s story is interesting, but the movie made out of it is inert, insisting on its own importance with a glossy, technically proficient surface that refuses to engage with the genuinely fascinating ideas inherent underneath. There are some pleasing elements, with a good cast working hard, craftspeople making fine period detail, and a typically excellent Alexandre Desplat score. It’s of minor interest for Anglophiles and WWII buffs, I suppose, but for starting with a tale so dramatic the end result is surprisingly empty.

Pride and Prejudices: BELLE

Bracingly sharp, Amma Asante’s Belle is a lovely character study and handsome period piece that navigates its complexities with invigorating intelligence and dexterous empathy. Set in 18th century England and based on a true story, it tells of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a mixed-race child of Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode). She was raised in his absence by his aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson), on a gorgeous estate. Freed from a life of slavery by virtue of her father’s station in life, she’s still trapped by the color of her skin.

As she grows older, Dido questions the social order, asking why she’s too high class to dine with the maids, and yet too low to dine with guests. Her inheritance gives her independent wealth, a luxury many women, including her close cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon), do not have. Dido does not need to marry for rank or income. She’s lucky, and yet stuck. Women are property no matter the color, not all slaves, but the well-to-do are stuck in a gilded cage of societal rules and expectations.

The film is stimulating as it gracefully turns circles around issues of race, gender, and class. It illuminates a time and place, deftly laying out the reasons for Dido’s circumstances, a rigid social structure that keeps women and people of color oppressed. Her uncle is the highest judge in the land, hearing the case of a slave ship that dumped its human cargo overboard and is now suing their insurers who refuse to compensate for the damages. Through this legal argument, brought into their house by his prospective pupil (Sam Reid), Dido is drawn into larger social awareness of the struggles of people who share her color.

She’s also growing keenly aware of the struggles of her sex, as she and her cousin are of age to be courted. Her cousin draws the attentions of a miserable racist wretch (Tom Felton) with a pushy, gossiping mother (Miranda Richardson), scrabbling to improve their family’s rank through marriage. Her other son (James Norton) is drawn to Dido, who knows not what to do with circumstances she was hardly expecting. Together, the girls have the blessing of belonging to a respected family, but Dido's difficulties are unique and hers alone.

It is in many ways a traditional period piece, with beautiful gowns, ornate sets, a lush orchestral score, and fastidious design, a dash of Austen romance here, a bit of Dickensian social commentary there. But Amma Asante’s writing and direction is uncommonly assured, well written, wonderfully photographed, and briskly paced. It lays out an argument for basic rights for women and people of color by having its historical characters grappling with these questions literally and explicitly throughout the course of the plot. They stand as symbols of the argument – gossiping racists, sniveling misogynists, noble activists, brooding legal scholars – and yet never appear to be merely constructs of a debate come to life.

The writing is in a clever, elevated Merchant-Ivory style, wittier and lively, full of fantastically droll asides, tremendous personality in all the supporting parts (including a small, choice turn for Penelope Wilton) and rich with evocative subtext. And the plot and theme go hand in hand, stirring and resonant social consciousness informed by character every step of the way. And what remarkable characters! All are colorfully brought to life with fine, full performances memorable in personality and conflict. Dido, especially, is imbued with great humanity by Mbatha-Raw, whose performance is wisely situated between privilege and disadvantage, open curiosity and wounded cynicism, hopeful romance and pragmatic resignation.

The movie so vividly and convincingly sketches in a portrait of her world, blessed with wealth and advantage tempered by the prejudice of a power structure that restricts women’s choices and confined the mother she never knew to a life of slavery. The filmmaking is tenderly attuned to the nuances of its lead performance. There’s a remarkable scene in which Dido’s suitor tells her that she’s so lucky he’s willing to overlook the curse of color her mother passed down to her. Her eyes well up with the faintest pained mistiness, and yet her proper smile never quivers or falters.

Assante unfailingly illuminates such breathtaking moments of emotional and psychological nuance. Unlike 12 Years a Slave, which summoned up detailed historical horror with unflinching punishment and cruelty, the better to make us wince and feel it, Belle goes about its effect in a tremendously inviting and empathetic way, making us feel the pointed sting of rejection, the quick gasp of love, the heartache of internalized oppression. In a scene late in the picture where Dido dares sneak out to see a man who may love her for who she is – all of who she is – there’s a trembling insert shot, no more than a split second, of her neck, a nervous tensing. Earlier, we saw them meet in a garden, a late night happenstance that also found another insert shot, a hand on a hip, a sharp intake of breath.

We see this sharp observation and warm compassion in scenes of dialogue between many combinations of characters in this ensemble as people slowly figure out how best to reconcile their notions of right and wrong with the rules of the society at the time, how best to do the right thing. The movie sits closely, attentively with its characters, making them flesh and blood human beings treated with understanding and compassion. In doing so, it casts light not just on history, but on modern tensions and fears, core dehumanizing inequalities that go by different names, but linger, no matter how circumstances may have changed in the meantime. I found the film completely engaging, expressively smart, and deeply moving.

Quick Look: A Single Man (2009)

A Single Man, the directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, is art directed and artfully edited to within an inch of its life. This is a suffocatingly persnickety film; Ford turns everything into a prop, lingering on the physicality of every performer and every object with the same intense gaze. He slows moments until they sizzle with a vibrancy and then past any such aesthetic pleasures until they are no longer indelible moments, but instead merely fussy ones. The only sense of urgency in the film is the heart-pounding sense of being fully immersed in the thoughts and feelings of the main character, a man planning to kill himself since he is distraught over the death of his lover. This man is played by Colin Firth, a fine actor who recently received an Oscar nomination for this very performance. The nomination makes a certain amount of sense to me, since Firth carries the film. His face and physicality show far more emotion than it first appears the filmmaking will allow. There’s genuine anguish and pain here, in the softly etched lines on Firth’s face, in the slow frowns and the slightly furrowed brow. Firth effortlessly made me care, bringing me in to the character’s plight in ways the overly designed film barely allows. Ultimately, the movie’s unsatisfying. It’s the kind of movie that’s so determined to leave an impact it leaves almost nothing at all. Potentially great supporting performances by the likes of Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, and Nicholas Hoult are buried under the art design and the frustratingly oppressive score by Abel Korzeniowski. Tom Ford has a strong, confident directorial style, but I wish he could just get out of his own way a little bit. Too often I felt like I was watching a deadly serious perfume ad.