Cinéma vérité

What if the integrity required of art gallery curators, who program for the public, was required of screenwriters who pen the biopics that are presented to vastly larger publics? 

Recently I went enthusiastically to see Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game. It was interesting to see two approaches to filming a “biography,” back-to-back. I found Mr. Turner richly rewarding and masterfully done and The Imitation Game to be pretty much loathsome.

It all comes down to this: Do you understand the man at the end of the film? With Timothy Spalding’s portrayal of Mr. Turner, I think you can come away with a real true sense of the man and his commitment to art making. But at after watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Alan Turing, you come away as you do from most film biographies—as accurate as a renaissance portrait of its subject.

Mr. Turner is an artist and Mr. Turing is a mathematician. Both of them are obsessive masters—perfect topics for another genius film that mixes insight with a gossipy look at private peccadillos that humanize their subjects.

Mr. Turner says: This is what he was like and it is the finest representation of a visual artist’s process that I have ever seen on film. It’s about his soul, and there is little to quibble with in terms of its truth. The Imitation Game, however is more narrative, it’s more a race against time to win the war. It is full of tension I never felt. It is about a mind, not a soul. It opts for the cliché ah-ha unexplained “moment,” providing little actual insight into the man’s genius and it takes gross liberties with truth.

I can’t imagine going to see The Theory of Everything but I may go, just to see Eddie Redmayne’s performance. Ask yourself: If a movie were to be made about Stephen Hawking, a man of unbelievable medical and mental accomplishment, what story would you tell? Would it be about his love life?

Sadly, we glorify misinformation in cinema made for massive global audiences yet hold our curators, who program for tiny audiences, to the highest possible standards.

The Lavender Postscript: "The Imitation Game" is the latest installment in the zillion-long list of films about homosexuals who, in the end, wind up dead or crazy. Brokeback Mountain, of course, having one dead and one crazy at the end.