culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Tron, The Imitation Game, and Inherent Vice
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Tron.
At rep cinemas this week: a pioneering CGI cult classic from the ’80s, a by-the-books biopic of Alan Turing, and a melancholy but funny Thomas Pynchon adaptation.
Tron
Directed by Steven Lisberger
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
There are films that are of their time and then there is Tron, Steven Lisberger’s equally ravishing and goofy early foray into the CGI blockbuster. Tron is both a response to the video and arcade game culture that had reached saturation point among American youths in the early ‘80s— launched into an unsuspecting world about a year before the great video game crash of 1983 — and Disney’s brave pioneering expedition into the then-fairly nascent field of computer animation. Whether it holds up as a film is almost beside the point.
Jeff Bridges stars as Flynn, a programmer and arcade impresario who clandestinely hacks into his former boss’s ominously named Master Control Program to prove his authorship of a stolen video-game concept. When he’s spotted, Flynn is digitized as punishment and launched into the Darwinian parallel world of The Grid, where he has to survive various gladiatorial challenges in order to make it back to real life.
Bridges does his best to inject a bit of his famous charisma into Lisberger’s austere world, but Tron is pretty dry stuff: the downtime between Flynn’s video game inspired challenges, as he plots his escape, is awfully tedious for a film about people who play on a professional basis. Still, one ought not underestimate the film’s gorgeous and utterly unique minimalist neon aesthetic, which has seeped its way into popular culture (and the hive mind of Daft Punk, among others) ever since. If its fixation on arcades and its vision of gaming as a series of player versus player battles feels awfully quaint now—the product of a very specific cultural moment that is long gone—its otherworldly art direction feels timeless.
The Imitation Game
Directed by Morten Tyldum
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
“Stay weird,” screenwriter Graham Moore advised alienated teens the world over when he collected his Oscar for Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, a biopic of code-cracking World War Two hero and computer inventor Alan Turing, played with the dignified aloofness you’d expect from Benedict Cumberbatch. Well-intentioned as his speech might have been, one comes out of the film he earned the award for wondering if Moore might have taken his own advice. A slickly produced, straightlaced Hollywood prestige picture right down to the stubborn but likeable genius at the centre, The Imitation Game is about as far from weird as these sorts of inspirational biographies get.
Not content to serve as merely a life-spanning profile of its hero, the film focuses on Turing’s efforts during the war, and on the uneasy connection between his professional identity as a code-breaker and his personal experience as a closeted gay man living under draconian laws that marked his sexuality a crime. That’s an interesting enough conceit, and Tyldum and Moore get some emotional mileage out of flashback sequences that shed light on Turing’s first doomed romance with a prep school mate.
But it’s not a thin line to hang a whole film on, and it certainly isn’t enough to compensate for the script’s tendency to provide tedious, self-congratulatory explications of its own themes at every turn. “Sometimes,” we are told more than once, “it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine”—the kind of meaningless bromide that wins Oscars without quite saying anything.
Inherent Vice
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
The Royal (608 College Street)
Save for Alex Ross Perry’s unofficial stab at Gravity’s Rainbow with Impolex, Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously complex novels have gone unadapted until Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Consider it especially impressive, then, that in addition to coming up with another formally dense, comic look at the history of Los Angeles—his signature theme in films as diverse as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood—Anderson has also wrought a fine adaptation of a difficult novel by one of the most distinctive prose stylists in American fiction.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a perpetually stoned hippie private eye who, in the weird transition between the ‘60s and the ‘70s, accidentally stumbles onto a vast conspiracy involving real estate, cults, and drug smuggling thanks to a fortuitous visit from his much-loved ex, Shasta (Kathleen Waterston). Meanwhile, civil rights–violating LAPD officer Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) is either on his tail or at his side the whole time, depending on which way the ganja cloud and its attendant paranoia blows.
If that all sounds both complicated and slight, well, it is, but we’re only as confused or bemused as our guide. Though he’s had better critical notices for more serious dramatic work, Phoenix deserves props here for what might be his best performance, an effortlessly funny and ultimately rather sweet turn as a guy who just wants to get back with the girlfriend who reminds him of Neil Young songs. For all its offbeat pacing and its rogues gallery of supporting performances—from the likes of Owen Wilson, Martin Short, and even singer Joanna Newsom, who also narrates in her perfect California drawl—at its heart, this is a melancholy movie about displaced people living in the wrong era, and it’s in Phoenix’s sad eyes as much as Pynchon’s text.