Actor Benedict Cumberbatch as British codebreaker and war hero Alan Turing on Tuesday led a colorful and moving array of biopics making their debut at the Toronto film festival this week.
Turing was a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and pioneer of computer sciences who broke Nazi codes for the British military during the Second World War, helping to shorten the war.
He ended his life in sadness, committing suicide in 1954 at the age of 41, two years after being convicted of the then crime of homosexuality.
In December 2013, he was awarded a posthumous pardon by Queen Elizabeth II following a long campaign by supporters.
Norwegian director Morten Tyldum’s “The Immitation Game,” about Turing’s work at code and cypher centre Bletchley Park, was released alongside a flurry of film portrayals of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, The Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson, American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer and notorious Colombian cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar that capped off the year of the biographical movie.
Films about Diana, Grace Kelly, and Yves Saint Laurent also premiered at Cannes earlier this year.
“There was something very subtle, uncompromising and unusual about (Turing) but also very quiet and stoic,” Cumberbatch told a press conference in Toronto.
“He didn’t knowingly martyr himself. He was just true to himself. He didn’t see himself as a victim or a hero, he just did work and behaved true to his nature.
“I think he would be the last person to describe himself as a hero, so that made it easier to portray him.”
“The Imitation Game” also stars Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode and Allen Leech of the hit television series “Downton Abbey.”
– Oscar buzz? –
Cumberbatch appeared in three movies at the Toronto film festival last year as a sympathetic plantation owner in “12 Years a Slave,” an awkward son in the dysfunctional family drama “August: Osage County” and as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in “The Fifth Estate.”
But his stellar performances were overlooked at awards time. The festival buzz surrounding his latest role is that the mistake will be righted at the next Oscars.
Beach Boys biopic “Love & Mercy,” starring John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti, also received a standing ovation in Toronto this past weekend, with Wilson himself present for the world premiere.
The film looks at two periods in the life of the visionary singer-songwriter who has struggled with addiction and mental illness: the California surf combo’s rise to stardom in the 1960s and Wilson’s solo resurgeance two decades later.
– Hawking on big screen –
British actor Eddie Redmayne, meanwhile, earned praise from critics for his remarkable performance as a fully able Stephen Hawking while a young Cambridge student in “The Theory of Everything,” based on a memoir by his first wife, Jane (played by Felicity Jones).
Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease after a fall at age 22, and was told he would only have two years to live.
Now 72, he is confined to a wheelchair and uses a computer with a voice synthesizer to communicate but has become arguably the most famous physicist since Albert Einstein, after having detailed his groundbreaking theories in the book “A Brief History of Time.”
Tobey Maguire also gives a strong performance in the behind-the-scenes look at “The Match of the Century” as American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer going up against the USSR’s defending champion Boris Spassky in 1972.
The film captures the tensions surrounding the match that drew more worldwide interest than any before or since, and turned a chessboard in Reykjavik into a Cold War battlefield.
As well, Benicio del Toro returns in the chilling drama “Escobar: Paradise Lost.”
The story unfolds during the final years of the cocaine kingpin’s reign, as seen through the eyes of a Canadian surfer (Josh Hutcherson) who falls in love with Escobar’s niece Maria (Claudia Traisac) and suddently finds himself on the inside of the trafficking empire that made Escobar one of the most savage and wealthiest criminals in history.