Keira Knightley's Imitation Game Is On Point
In 2009, Keira Knightley made her stage debut in the Martin Crimp adaption of Moliere’s The Misanthrope in London’s West End. About a month later I left America for the first time to go on a spectacular tour of London’s best stages through my alma mater, Chapman University, and got to see the play. Knightley’s performance was so out of sync with the rest of the cast (which included the likes of Damian Lewis) that the audience actually laughed at her – not with her – at several points, leaving me squirming sympathetically in my seat.
After my fellow students and I returned back to our little Orange County campus, I took a course – The History Of Acting In American Film – with the professor who had led the trip. I’ll never forget something he told us: perhaps even more than screen actors create their performances, those performances are dictated and shaped in the cutting room. Even the worst of performances can be finessed into mediocrity by a good editor. That’s why theater actors often translate well to camera, but not the other way around, he pointed out. As he explained this, I thought of immediately Knightley.
After watching The Imitation Game, I feel a bit guilty that I’ve spent the past five years (cue my “oh god, has it been that long since college?” quarter-life crisis) telling this story to anyone I discuss Knightley with. After that London performance, I had trashed any notion I previously had that she might have some talent; and I had thought so at one point. Her role in The Duchess, for instance, was one of the films that illustrated that glimmer in her.
We all have our growing pains, and it seems Knightley has learned a great deal from hers (we all remember Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean). Or perhaps acting alongside the inarguably brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch (as Alan Turing) helped draw out the best in her. Whatever the cause, The Imitation Game proved Knightley (as Joan Clarke) has come into her own. (Spoilers ahead.)
While I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a scene stealer – because let’s face it, nobody is going to steal any scenes from Cumberbatch – as Joan Clarke, she shared the screen opposite him with elegance, poise and ease of character, and she met his wild yet measured emotional range with equal precision. When Turing rails against Joan with spitting hate after a frightening encounter with a high-level government spy in an effort to scare her off for her own good, Knightley could have easily seemed diminutive in comparison. Instead, she rose to the occasion, holding her ground and meeting his rawly played fear with what can only be described as grit.
And in the film’s final moments, when Turing is shaking and losing his most beloved asset, his mind, as Joan, Knightley’s recognition of his condition, and his life-long loneliness and passion and drive all being snuffed out by a homophobic government (which, for background, had ordered him to be chemically castrated for acts of homosexuality) would have registered perfectly without any dialogue.
I’m not sure what took place in the cutting room for this film, but I’m willing to bet the filmmakers had a wealth of material to work with.