BODYGUARD AND ITS TWISTS

I was going to put a spoiler alert at the top of this page, but since according to media I am the only adult in Britain who didn't watch the final episode of Bodyguard last Sunday and then spend all day Monday chatting about it on the metaphoric water-cooler that is social media, I don't feel I have to bother. So let me say that I was both disappointed and relieved that Julia Montague's death didn't turn out to be hoax, which would have been daring but also a twist too far. Of course writer Jed Mercurio, having killed off his lynch-pin character, had to twist like Chubby Checker to try to keep things interesting and watchers' brains spinning.

Keely Hawes' departure left a hole to fill which was not quite filled by the Ipad filled with 'compromat'. As an aside, I think 'Compromat' ought to be the name of the next TMZ-style website that comes along. But an Ipad can't do what Hawes does, like stand in the doorway playing with herself. Theresa May and Amber Rudd, eat your hearts out.

At that point the focus of the story fell directly on conspiracy, and DS Budd's personal life dropped into softer, if still monomaniacal, focus. Which is sort of good, because the need of Richard Madden's performance to extend to a second dimension is thus minimised. Madden has the poker face required of a bodyguard. He has the determined poker face required of a cop/soldier on a mission. He has the puzzled poker face of a victim of a conspiracy. And he has the pained poker face of a suffering war veteran who's seen too much. And the frustrated poker face of the damaged husband trying to deal with wife and kids.

In the final episode we got all those faces at once in the key scene, an extended etude on the theme of defusing a bomb, which includes a bizarre march across the city to his flat, with his estranged wife by his side so no one will shoot him. The problem is bomb diffusing stories, always cliched in suspense terms, have basically two outcomes. You snip the wire and....bam, you're dead. Or you snip the wire and you're not dead, then you can jump over the convenient wall all the cops have conveniently retreated far enough away from to make escape convenient. But without it you would have missed Madden walking through the streets with a bloodied face in a serape, like the Man With No Name, rather than the Man With No Expressions.

OK. So far so good. But from the moment Julia was killed, we, knowing we had a conspiracy, knew it had to involve some combination of political plotters (either to install Julia as PM and/or to oust the PM) MI5 plotters (to install Julia with her surveillance friendly bill) or police plotters (to avoid Julia and MI5 taking away their own repressive powers?). That last one never made much sense, but it could also have been a combo platter of two or even all three, something signalled by the stern expressions on the big time police women (Gina McKee as the Met's counter-terror chief and Pippa Heywood as the head of the protection unit where Budd is placed), and the close and cynical cooperation between Mike Travis, minister for counter-terrorism (played by Vincent Franklin as if he'd wandered in from the Labour cabinet in A Very British Coup) and MI5 director Stephen Hunter-Dunn.

The Bodyguard Award for Over-Acting By A Character With A Hyphenated-Surname went to Stuart Bowman as Hunter-Dunn. His facial contortions started out as mere Dudley Nightshade, but by the final episode they were the most serious distorted human visage seen in this country since Keira Knightly was unhinging her jaw in A Dangerous Method.

But there had to be a BIG TWIST, so instead of political conspiracy we discover that the bombings were the result of actual Islamic terrorists, working hand in hand with gangsters, who kind of entered the scene late in the story, except that the Home Secretary's assistant, who got fired early, was apparently hooked up with them from the start. It sounded like the Kennedy assassination, if you actually want to believe that the killers were either Cuban terrorists or the Mafia. And as with the Warren Report, Mercurio's big problems here are many.

Presumably all the fuss from MI5 (and Michael Schaffer, their teflon hit-man, whose face is almost equally silent-movie snarling as Bowman's) is simply to get their blackmailing material back. So why is Travis on their side here? Does he not suspect they might have eliminated Julia? Would he not worry, unless he were part of their plot?

Nadia Ali (Anjli Mohindra), as the suicide bomber Studd, I mean Budd, talks out of blowing up a Virgin Train loo, makes a nice turn at the end, but I wonder if Mercurio had seen and remembered the similar scene in Patriots Day? Regardless, the flip of Nadia begs the questions of (a) why she didn't detonate her bomb on the train in the first place, but more importantly (b) what kind of terror organisation uses its main builder of insanely complicated explosive devices as a suicide bomber? The answer to that latter is question is, of course, none. The people sent to blow themselves up are disposable. Besides, she was apparently the contact with the gangsters (how, is never explained) and the gangsters were also the Islamic terrorists' main source of income (not, say, the Saudis). So blow up one and cut off the other. Plus she remembered the name of Budd's childrens' school? Just so she could launch a terror attack there, and so Mercurio could misdirect our attention toward the people who in the real world would have been the only ones to know that school. He told her that? Was he trying to bore her into not detonating the bomb?

And why has these brutally efficient gangsters bothered to corrupt the head of the protection unit? They anticipated they might someday want to kill a home secretary? One they already had someone working for? The protection unit is not responsible for anti-crime activity, yet Pippa Heywood was apparently feeding them intel enough to live in a pretty posh house for copper standards in London. What about her intel was so valuable?

The cops themselves are interesting, Ash Tandon as Deepak Sharma and Nina Toussaint-White as Lousie Rayburn do their own sort of twisting duet, switching places in the do we believe Judd or don't we believe Judd sweepstakes, even, at the end, when it should be obvious. What is also interesting, and I found the most convincing part of the drama, was the sheer Robocop/Starship Trooper mindlessness of the armed police--a military force of occupation so focused on their methodology it seemed unlikely in the extreme not one of them would shoot Budd dead, and even more extreme no one would order the shot, if only to nip their terrorism and treason problems in the Budd, so to speak.

The British audience disliked the happy-ish ending, calling it (of course) Hollywood, ie, we wrote it and produced it this way for our audience, but don't blame us, it's the Americans' fault. I disliked the real flaws in flipping the story right at the end, whether for the need to add those final BIG TWISTS, or whether we didn't want to show MI5 or Met anti-terrorism units as being traitorous. I know which scenario would be more believable to me. It wasn't like Kevin Coster and Whitney Houston, with Keely Hawes singing at Tory Party conference while Madden looks on admiringly. But I do wonder why they did not use the great Dawn Landes song 'Bodyguard' as their theme.

THE IMITATION GAME: OSCAR'S 'BASED ON A TRUE STORY' CATCH UP II

What it is about Bletchley that drives the British crazy? Another Oscar nominee 'based on a true story', The Imitation Game provides yet another rejoinder to the British obsession with criticising Hollywood's playing with historical fact while ignoring British films which are every bit as 'economical with the 'actualite'. As I watched The Imitation Game, waiting for Kate Winslett to cycle through one of the shots, I recalled that in Enigma the traitor turned out to be a Pole. Except no Poles were allowed to work at Bletchley, even though the Poles had provided the Brits with an Enigma machine; they were banned because Johnny Foreigner can't be trusted to keep secrets like good old chappies from the right schools and Oxbridge.

The Imitation Game is structured as a thrilller: can Alan Turing and the Famous Five solve Hitler's puzzle in time to win the war? In order to make this thrilling, some truths need to be bent. Turing's inspiration, of looking for the words, like 'Heil Hitler' that appeared in every message was something that had been part of the decoding process since almost the beginning. And of course it wasn't simply a handful of people in one quonset hut watching while Turing built his computer; there were thousands of people engaged in the process at Bletchley Park.

But as the title implies, The Imitation Game isn't really a thriller. It's about Turing himself, as the ultimate enigma, and his own Imitation Game, his hidden life which saw him arrested for indecency in the early Fifties, and given drugs to chemically castrate him. Which is a story worth telling, and which has been told in a number of biographies. But the film traps itself in a morbid fascination with the appeal of victimhood, which forces it to twist Turing and his work to fit its framework of injustice.

There need to be obstacles in Turing's way, besides the obvious mechanical and mathematical ones. Hitler isn't villain enough for this film. The real villain has to be Alastair Denniston, transformed from a cryptographer himself who apparently ran his unit well, into a Colonel Blimp figure ignorant of the work his staff was doing and more obsessed with bringing down Turing than Hitler. Which is a shame, because the opening sparring between Charles Dance as Denniston and Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing is great, and could have been the basis of some dramatic tension without creating a cardboard villain.

In this film Turing has the double curse of being both gay and geek. Although Cumberbatch has a few Sherlock Holmes moments early in the movie, he has to be portrayed as being completely asocial (despite a dress sense which only disappears after he's drugged); the real Turing apparently could be quite gregarious. Although the film is sympathetic to Turing, it revels in stereotyping him: twice in the film Turing in effect commits treason: after the war by telling his whole story to the Javert-like detective who's convinced he's a spy, and during the war by hiding the fact that John Cairncross is a Soviet spy. Of course Cairncross, the infamous Fifth Man, never worked with Turing, ergo, Turing never was blackmailed by him, ergo Hollywood must have slipped this into the script when no noble Englishman was looking.

The conceit of the film, in turning Turing's paper titled The Imitation Game into a metaphor for his self, is a good one. He 'thinks differently', and a parallel is drawn between the man and his thinking machine. But in his naming the machine Christopher, after his lost early love, and his breakdown at the thought of losing what by movie's end is his only friend, takes him completely overboard. What's touching is the way Turing learns early to cover up his emotions, when the headmaster tell him his friend is dead, and he realises he never knew Christopher was even ill. Yet it's just as much English public school stiff upper lip as English closeted homosexuality. But just maybe the two are connected. But as young Turing says to Christopher, all speech is really in code, and in that is the core of what this film ought to have been about.

Turing was victimised, of course, but he also lived an active life (we never see a moment of gay affection in the entire movie; in fact its iconography is more concerned with the love story between Turing and Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightly who looks as out of place in the 1940s as she does doing higher mathematics, although she does jut her jaw on cue). It was Turing who reported the burglary of his house to the police, not imagining it would lead to his own prosecution. And though the film says Turing committed suicide after finishing his court-ordered drug treatment, he in fact died a year afterwards, and there is some debate about whether his death were accidental rather than suicide.

It is right that Turing should be elevated to the position of a national hero, and that the prosecution and persecution of homosexuality should be condemned. The movie is strongest precisely at the moments Turing seems most human: when he realises immediately upon breaking the code that it cannot be used immediately to save lives. That one of the team has a sailor brother whose life is endangered that day is the kind of clunky fictional liberty one allows in a film, but it's a lazy way to add to dramatic tension. Still, there are liberties and there are liberties, as a 1940s bishop might have said to an actress, or indeed an actor. Bend the reality of Bletchley to make the chase of code-breaking more exciting, that's the way the game is played. But bend it to insist on Turing as a helpless victim, and reduce him to tears (it reminded me of Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; he's left crying there too, as Guillam is given a gay backstory that seems to exist only for that teary payoff) and that's unfair, and indeed unheroic. The Imitation Game is structured and written (by Graham Moore, based on Andrew Hodges' book) cleverly, and directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum with the same visual panache and sense of movement that made Headhunters so enjoyable. Within its own terms works well; it's just a shame its terms are so limited by its agenda.