Cracking the male code with Unbroken and The Imitation Game

World War II’s Pacific and European combat theaters fight it out for Christmas Day moviegoers and various awards-season statues with dueling Great Man biopics. Each looks lustrous and period-proper, and each deploys a spare and dramatic Alexandre Desplat score. One stars Benedict Cumberbatch and takes full advantage of the cerebral actor’s gifts to depict an inscrutable martyr. The other makes a gift of its hero’s uncomplicated suffering to largely unknown actor Jack O’Connell, whom director Angelina Jolie means to make an old-fashioned star with her old-fashioned, workmanlike movie.

The Imitation Game, with Cumberbatch as computing pioneer and Enigma-code breaker Alan Turing and with Kiera Knightley reprising her Atonement moves (and, as usual, very effective in a supporting-sized dose), is unapolgetically tweedy, way too stagey (even with its multiple insulting inserts of planes in formation, world leaders in talks and other absurdly boldfaced reminders that the War Rages On), and as loose as you’d expect with the facts and the timeline. Stiff upper lips, PBS-positive production values, a script recalling the era’s radio dramas.

Unbroken, with O’Connell as Olympic runner and U.S. airman Louis Zamperini and no Kiera Knightley for at least a continent, is unapolegitically nostalgic for manliness, full stop. Jolie hasn’t so much adapted Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand’s Zamperini book of the same title as she has quilted the black-and-white fabric of bygone sports, foxhole and prisoner-of-war B-pictures into a prestige-tooled lite event, centering on Greatest Generation male perseverance.

Joel and Ethan Coen are credited as the primary screenwriters, with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson also lending their good names but no one doing much of note. It’s committee work, offering us a Gumpian glimpse of Hitler’s Berlin Games, complete with Jesse Owens, along with dogfights and sharks and a distractingly mincing prison-camp commander (Japanese pop star and newbie actor Miyavi, charismatic in spite of the role’s limits). Unbroken gives us pain without true darkness, with O’Connell (who has no great lines to utter) an Everyman rather than the troubled pilgrim of Hillenbrand’s book.

Unbroken, I am saying, is the one with the Coldplay song.

The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum from a screenplay by Graham Moore (based on Andrew Hodges’ Turing biography), has no pretensions toward epic-osity. It’s a showcase for a semi-typecast Cumberbatch (a chilly, borderline-sociopathic Holmes on the hugely successful series Sherlock), who makes the historic figure Turing — a closeted gay genius ruined by the country he served — as real as a movie like this allows. It’s an affecting but often subtle portrayal, and it is, by design, enough reason to see this otherwise too simple movie. Imitation is no less  manipulative than Unbroken, but it is, on the story’s merits, far sadder.

Making a holiday decision? The filmmaking in both is all but anonymous (give or take cinematographer Roger Deakins, whom Jolie has borrowed from the Coens for her project), but Cumberbatch is good enough for two movies. If your group puts it to a vote, and if you must vote at all, cast for Imitation.

See you in hell, Coldplay.