BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

ARTIST FLOURISHING ON SCREEN ACTING INSIDE THE THINNEST OF SKINS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Heroes are too often portrayed on the silver screen just all good with no realism involved or in a less than flattering light.

Benedict Cumberbatch flourishes on screen with the development of three dimensional characters to the point that even truly villainess characters can be found, momentarily at least, in the best possible light, considering all the circumstances. 

The actor’s artful performances underscore the realism within humanity that good characters are not always good, and bad characters are not always bad.

Cumberbatch jumps inside the skin of film characters and makes the interpretation come to life inside a bit of the ether that exists between actor and audience.

In The Power of the Dog (2021) Phil Burbank inspires fear as a charismatic rancher using bitter criticism and physical punishment to deter anyone from challenging his sense of purpose.

Kirsten Dunst provides a supporting role as Rose Gordon, as does Jesse Plemons as George Burbank.

Phil and his brother George have developed the ranch together with much fraternal love. George though has grown accustomed to Phil’s bitter nature, and in his way, he has retreated into a bit of a shell that Phil has started to resent and test, and then resent all the more after the testing is completed.

Director James Campion shows the majestic landscapes of Montana ranch country alongside the stories of hard driven cowboys making an honest living off the land. For this artful filmmaking, Campion won the Oscar for Best Directing.

The camera follows Cumberbatch around the set as he plays a tough side, but as the narrative unravels, with the beauty of the mountain ranges explained, a more delicate and nurturing side materializes among the romantic landscape in which he purposefully chooses to remain.

Campion moves the story along until Cumberbatch turns the two-dimensional rancher into a bit of a sympathetic three dimensional figure whose toughness might be protecting a more delicate side that plays the banjo and enjoys the cowboy art of making rope from rawhide.

In this way, Cumberbatch creates integrity for the character and subsequently raises questions as to why he is so mean and why he can be so nurturing at the same time.

In The Current War (2017) Cumberbatch plays Thomas Alva Edison as an aggressive entrepreneur conscious of the need to protect his place in history as the world converts from kerosene oil to electricity.

Michael Shannon co-stars as Edison’s rival, George Westinghouse, while Nicholas Hoult plays Nikola Tesla, the eccentric genius with the really big ideas about providing electricity to the cities.

Edison means well but he can also be quite cutting to people that are in his way toward destiny, like when he refuses to stop the train to meet with Westinghouse and his family for dinner. Edison changes his mind at the last minute with the train streaming by Westinghouse and his family waiting on the station platform.

Cumberbatch also shows Edison to be a bit myopic when rejecting Tesla’s criticism and alternative ideas for distributing electricity, and also when reneging on a promise to pay extra for any ideas that fix problems inside the Edison laboratory.

Cumberbatch acts out all the faults in the character in a way that gives a further dimension to the established public image. Instead of mirroring the historical image, the character is gently persuaded to reveal his true self.

In this way, a more realistic light is cast on the biographical character as well as the history in which they lived.

The acting art really becomes about holding the integrity of the historical character together while exploring the true elements of humanity at play at any given moment in time.

When Phil Burbank chooses to mentor Rose’s son by showing him how to incrementally make rope out of rawhide, he reveals that same inner self shown by Thomas Edison displaying his moving picture machine at the Chicago World’s Columbia Exposition in 1893, even though Westinghouse has won the day by delivering electricity to the fairgrounds with his alternating current design developed by Tesla.

This duality of human nature is revealed ever so more gently to the biopic character instrumental in the development of the first computers.

In The Imitation Game (2014) director Morten Tyldum cast Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, alongside Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke. Mark Strong plays the head of British intelligence, Steward Menzies.

The Germans made military gains during World War II in part with an advanced messaging system that communicates in code between military command and the commanders in charge of troop movement.

Tyldum brings a cast together of biopic characters that undertakes on behalf of the British intelligence services to break this German Enigma Code.

Cumberbatch initially creates a focussed and extremely driven mathematician stepping forward to serve the British cause. But the British hero of World War II operating in the deep background has a few personality traits and flaws that make him even more interesting as a study.

Turing’s social skills are just no where to be seen as if emerging from years of isolation with numbers and math puzzles, as he quickly alienates the intelligence team under his charge.

Cumberbatch shows though that Turing was sophisticated enough to breach the liberal divide by recruiting the best mathematicians to solve the German puzzle regardless of gender. Knightley plays Clark who must remain segregated from the male mathematicians but who has a lasting impact on the spy project due in large part to Turing.

The often at times too clinical mathematician begins to soften as his admiration grows for Clark.

Turing is shown to succeed in isolation laboring over the machine that broke the Enigma Code and later near the end of the narrative with his flat occupied by an increasingly more powerful machine that eventually led to formalised concepts of algorithm and artificial intelligence.

A much more complex three dimensional hero is created in The Fifth Estate (2013).

Daniel Bruhl and Alicia Vikander provide supporting roles as director Bill Condon casts Cumberbatch as the enigmatic anti-hero Jullian Assange.

The Wikileaks founder is created with all the endearing character ticks and faults of a computer nerd taking on state institutions as an investigative journalist, except that Assange’s sources are a legion of computer hackers and whistleblowers disclosing classified secrets uploaded to his website.

Cumberbatch gives Assange all the facial ticks and eccentricities one might expect of a cyber punk operating long hours in the dark in front of a bright computer screen. Assange may have eaten one too many meals away from the dinner table with his laptop by his side, as Cumberbatch licks his finger and pushes the power button on his hard drive.

While Assange may be focussed on micro cyber security issues, such as the ability to hack government mainframes, his personality is driven by the lofty ideas of truth, freedom and democracy that can galvanize a crowd and attract hundreds of hackers to his cause for global justice.

The head ticks and decidedly long blonde hair covers up an intellect occupied with thoughts about the power of governments in censoring digital information.

Anke Domescheit, played by Alicia Vikander, even becomes annoyed at Assange’s eccentricities, although she believes in the truth of his cause.

Cumberbatch creates a moral being that finds other moral beings to expose the secrets of corruption despite the inevitable personality clashes.

In the briefest of moments in the narrative, Assange marvels out loud at the transparency of modern Berlin and the transformative powers of an idea in a city that was once controlled by the fascists who had ruined the world.

Cumberbatch touches the ether ever so lightly in the scene.

Cumberbatch often pins the bully up against the wall and rides out the bad parts to more endearing character traits.

Director Peter Jackson puts the motion-capture skin on Cumberbatch as the giant controlling dragon in the Hobbit (2012-2014) trilogy of films.

Smaug is much feared because of the backstory, but the dragon has a lot of treasure to protect from the thieving hobbits and dwarves.

The backstory also gives the Villain Khan a more complete character in Star Trek into the Darkness (2013).

Khan shape shifts a bit to create the impression that he is fleeing from intergalactic persecution or that at the least he has a major persecution complex. As a result, every ounce of Khan’s being seems to be focussed on waking his accomplices from hypersleep.

Of course, Cumberbatch relies on the audience not knowing the full back story and not having foreknowledge into just how bad Khan will be once he is reunited with his crew and has control of a starship capable of warp speed.

Commander John Harrison aka Khan is no cookie cutter villain shaped for the Hollywood Blockbusters. Khan has the ability to affect positive change as much as negative outcomes. And Cumberbatch shows the motivations of this mysterious intergalactic being with unconventional superhuman powers.

Cumberbatch put on weight to look the part in scenes when the character musters extraordinary strength and ability. Cumberbatch also took martial arts courses in preparation for the action sequences.

The visual interpretations of the villains are as equally important as that of the heroes. And that visual field changes from good to bad and quite often, before all is said and done, back to good again.

In The Courier (2020) as Greville Wynne a successful businessperson recruited to infiltrate Moscow, Cumberbatch creates varying degrees of visual interpretations for different circumstances the hero faces along the narrative.

Cumberbatch shows just enough of the skin he has jumped inside to carry interest as the narrative unwinds bit by bit. The character adjusts to different situations and in each new scenario the visual field becomes deeper until total transparency is achieved.

This acting skill is particularly useful in heroic biographical roles when history can be unforgiving, while the contemporary world relies on the actor’s interpretation of the character for the truth of its contents. Far from being flat and boring, Cumberbatch often illustrates the interesting depth of humanity by what the hero cannot do as much as by what the hero can do, and what actually gets done quite well.

In the thinnest of takes, Cumberbatch creates deliberately sublime characters by assuming just enough personality to be distinctive without exaggerating the truth of the personality he has recreated from the real thing.

In Brexit (2019) the political organizer behind a campaign for Britain to leave the European Union has just enough distinctiveness to be accepted as an ideas person, someone who is well read and thinks a lot in isolation to come up with a genuinely novel impetus for the campaign.

Cumberbatch again portrays a character flourishing in isolation who then steps forward to share those discoveries made there for use in a broader public context.

This sublime singularity had occurred before as a grieving father whose young daughter is abducted while at the check out counter of a grocery store in The Child in Time (2017).

Stephen spends almost the entire runtime in psychological isolation with Cumberbatch portraying the character wandering the narrative in search of his missing daughter and sharing psychological images of her in various corners of his imagination.

The three dimensional characters are preserved because the audience is able to fill in the backstory using common knowledge as a kind of ellipse. Stephen could be any parent while Cumberbatch shares the heart felt emotions the loss evokes that hopefully no one has had to experience.

In the Courier, everyone has an idea about spying from various sources and different incantation of imagining, but what that transition from the private life to government service looks like and feels like and how to make the difficult choices along the way is something the audience only discovers with Cumberbatch in a sublime sharing within the ether.

What we don’t know makes the story more interesting and the narrative all the more compelling as the truth becomes incrementally revealed.

Benedict Cumberbatch, by Justin Lewis, London, John Blake Publishing, 2015.