Tag: Benedict Cumberbatch

Black Mass

Scott Cooper’s follow-up to ‘Out of the Furnace’ stars Johnny Depp as Boston gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger

BlackMassPosterThe best scene in “Black Mass”, a biopic on the life of Boston’s notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, is when a naïve, young waif of a girl is picked up by Bulger and her stepdad after spending the night in jail. Bulger grills her on exactly what the police asked of her and how much she knows. What’s exciting about the scene is not the fear of what Bulger might do but how oblivious she is to all the danger she’s in.

The amusing nature of this exchange may be entirely unintentional. We know exactly what Bulger’s going to do with her. Director Scott Cooper has reduced Bulger into a monster, not even a ruthless human being with a hint of dimension. He kills and has people kill for him, and his fuse is so short that any sense of his humanity, or of those around him, is long gone.

Appropriately, Johnny Depp plays Bulger with an alien sensibility in line with his equally eccentric performances for Tim Burton and others. Thin, slick-backed gray hair, a forehead that dwarfs even his massively dark old-man sunglasses, and piercing blue eyes make him more vampire than gangster.

But Depp’s performance feels hollow in a movie that has little substance or real style behind it. “Black Mass” documents Bulger’s rise to power in the South Side of Boston during the ‘70s and ‘80s when Bulger became an informant for the FBI and his old childhood buddy John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Connolly believes by looking the other way on Bulger, his intelligence can help the agency land a more significant Italian mafia family. But once the mob is out of power and Bulger is given a free reign of terror, the movie loses its steam. Cooper bookends the film with interview testimonials of Bulger’s crew making confessions, so there’s no tension to if or when Bulger and Connolly’s jig will be up.

Cooper has some talent as a director, but not as a storyteller or stylist. He borrows plenty of Scorsese-isms from other greater and equally mediocre gangster films, but adds none of the themes of morality or loyalty to any significant degree. It results in a lot of empty killings and point blank shootings in broad daylight, a lot of penetrating death stares and friendly conversations turned tense. Cooper staged similar scenes of dire gravity and violent melodrama in his last film, “Out of the Furnace.” But the Americana trappings found there had no bearing to social issues either, as though staging these scenes was enough to make such themes emerge.

“Black Mass” also falls into a trap of some unfortunate casting and poor usage of its talented cast. Joel Edgerton is so blindly a hot-head, the antithesis to Depp’s low-key hiss, that it’s a wonder he’s able to pull the wool over his superiors’ eyes. People like Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, Jesse Plemons and Juno Temple are in the film so briefly they barely register. And if it seemed like there was nothing Benedict Cumberbatch could not do, make the Brit don a Boston accent and you may have found it.

In an interview with the police, one of Bulger’s cohorts is asked his opinion of his boss. “He’s strictly criminal.” “Black Mass” is so flat and generic that it can’t be held in much higher esteem.

2 ½ stars

The Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum tells the life story of Alan Turing and his important work creating the first computer during World War II to win the war.

Imitation-Game-PosterNo one goes into making a movie trying to make an “Oscar movie”, which with eight nominations and Best Picture frontrunner status, “The Imitation Game” has easily been for some time. But a director will go into a film trying to convey a person’s importance. Those fawning biopic qualities of genius in Morten Tyldum’s film overshadow the crafty genre picture of numbers and intellect waiting to be decoded.

“The Imitation Game” depicts the life work of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British mathematician who invented a machine designed to break the Nazi code Enigma during World War II. Thousands of messages were sent via this decryption machine during wartime, crippling Allied intelligence in the process. The machine was so sophisticated that it was thought unbreakable.

When Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) conveys to Turing the stakes of not being able to crack this code, “The Imitation Game” shines. “Do you know how many people have died at the hands of Enigma? Three. While we’ve been having this conversation.” He gives Turing the impossible odds, and Tyldum appeals to the audience’s gamesmanship. It’s a riddle, and by explaining how code breaking works and how Turing learned to decipher codes as a child, we feel a little smarter watching it.

In something like “A Beautiful Mind”, that was almost enough. The logic behind John Nash’s theories and cryptography made for compelling filmmaking. But Tyldum tries to tie all of Turing’s number crunching into work befitting Mozart or Steve Jobs. “Think of it as an Electrical Brain. A Digital Computer,” he explains in laymen’s terms and putting the careful emphasis on “computer” to his colleague and sort of love interest Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). You see, not only did Turing single handedly win World War II by breaking an unbreakable Nazi code, but he also single handedly invented the one tool that defines every aspect of modern society. Isn’t he great?

Most traditional biopics have only determined two personality types for people of unspeakable genius: the overconfident and smug visionary or the awkward, anti-social nerd. Both end up being assholes in one way or another. Much like Russell Crowe’s work as John Nash, Cumberbatch’s performance places him into the latter category, sputtering through dialogue, looking fervently at his shoes, avoiding eye contact, missing social cues and acting generally blunt, deadpan and slyly witty.

It’s admirable work, and Cumberbatch’s chemistry with Knightley brings out the film’s understated social politics. She was forced to work in secret on Turing’s team because it was deemed inappropriate for a woman to be in the company of men on the job, and he was forced to mask his homosexuality, two details that give the film an added layer of dramatic tension.

Beyond that, “The Imitation Game” somewhat lacks in creating real drama. Cooped up inside offices and missing any war footage, the stakes aren’t truly obvious for Turing and his team until late in the film when they finally crack one, torn between how this new intelligence and their new power can shape the war. Tyldum then amps up the personal melodrama of Turing’s childhood and the “importance of what he’s doing here” in a way that screams prestige.

As a British period drama about a genius, “The Imitation Game” has perhaps wrongly been compared to “The Theory of Everything.” But Tyldum’s film views his genius with more depth than James Marsh does, and even if in the grand scheme of history Turing is less important than Stephen Hawking, he puts enough weight and excitement into the film to convince otherwise.

3 stars

August: Osage County

Meryl Streep is excellent in the broadest, most vile performance in her career.

Meryl Streep has gone broader in her acting as her career has continued to explode. Between a vicious nun, Julia Child, a scathing magazine editor and Margaret Thatcher, her roles as an ordinary everywoman from “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” have somewhat faded in memory.

With a role like Violet Weston, Streep is playing the broadest and vilest in her career. The character from Tracy Letts’s play “August: Osage County”, unseen by me, is infamous, and people have been quick to label Streep as merely scene-chewing. Her challenge as an actress is to rise above the bigness and vices of her character, to show a wounded, sympathetic and tragic figure underneath all the bile.

When we first meet her in “August: Osage County,” she’s worn, frumpy and unrecognizable, sporting the thin hairdo she had in the concentration camp in “Sophie’s Choice,” this time ravaged by chemo therapy. But with her big black wig on or not, she shows no vulnerability in taking swipes at her family while being slightly endearing in the process. Continue reading “August: Osage County”

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”

Star Trek Into Darkness

“Star Trek Into Darkness” isn’t overstuffed, but isn’t exactly balanced, and it begs for more innovation.

J.J. Abrams’s innovation on the “Star Trek” reboot was that he managed to take a long-standing institution, play with a very sacred universe’s timeline and still manage to canonize it. If he didn’t manage to impress me, and I was one of very few, it’s that doing so was his only innovation.

Set pieces existed for their own sake, as did stylistic camera twirls and lens flares. Dialogue teetered on being self-serious and self-referential without pausing for breath, and the plot that grew out of it didn’t make as much sense as it appeared. Even Roger Ebert pointed out that in this futuristic sci-fi epic, space battles were reduced to cataclysmic mayhem and sparring with fists and swords.

And although “Star Trek Into Darkness” improves upon that last aspect to the point that I enjoyed everything I saw, part of me wishes the Abrams from “Super 8” showed up, to dust off a cliché, and boldly go where none have gone before. Point being, if you’re looking for innovation here, you won’t find it. Continue reading “Star Trek Into Darkness”