The Imitation Game
Director: Morten Tyldum
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Matthew Beard
Five stars
It is clearly the season for Oscar-worthy performances by British actors playing mathematical geniuses who are facing daunting personal odds.
Sound overly specific? Consider this: later this month, we will get the chance to see The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as the brilliant British physicist Stephen Hawking.
But first, we have The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the British mathematician Alan Turing, the man chiefly responsible for cracking the vaunted Enigma code used by the Germans during the Second World War.
But even though Turing literally changed the course of human history – Winston Churchill said he had made the greatest single contribution to the Allied victory, helping to cut the war short by several years – and also created one of the first modern computers, many people have never heard of him.
That would be reason enough to applaud the arrival of The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore based on a 1983 book by Andrew Hodges.
But though it often feels like your basic highbrow British biopic, the film also happens to boast impeccable acting, especially from Cumberbatch, who masterfully captures the jittery, nervy brilliance of a man whose mind brought down the German war machine yet couldn’t process simple human interactions.
Was Turing autistic? Did he have Asperger’s syndrome? Who knows – today we’d probably say he was “on the spectrum”.
In the film, he’s a man who can’t coherently answer the question of whether he wants a sandwich for lunch. At the same time, he’s conceiving a machine that will somehow defeat the Germans’ own cipher machine, Enigma, which uses an incredibly complex code that changes every 24 hours, rendering traditional decryption methods useless.
As we learn about this painful duality in Turing’s life, we also learn about his troubled personal life. After the war, he was prosecuted for indecency. Given a choice of “chemical castration” or prison, he chose the former. Soon after, he committed suicide at the age of just 41, consuming a cyanide-laced apple by his bedside.
Oddly, though, the film addresses Turing’s death only with a quick line in the postscript and no word on the method. It’s a strange omission – particularly given that Turing was said to have been fascinated by the story of Snow White.
The film begins after the war, with the police investigating a mysterious break-in at Turing’s home and wondering what this fellow is all about – they don’t yet know about his role during the war.
We flash back to 1939, and Turing’s job interview with the commander – a nicely crusty Charles Dance – running the secret codebreaking programme. Given Turing’s dreadful personal skills, it doesn’t go well.
He is nevertheless hired and immediately starts alienating his colleagues, especially the charismatic Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode, who is excellent and perhaps the best-looking mathematician ever seen on screen – at least until Keira Knightley enters the story).
Turing is ridiculed for insisting on building his machine, taking up time and money while soldiers are dying. Denied funding, he makes a direct plea to Churchill, who puts him in charge. That’s when he hires Joan Clarke (Knightley), the only woman on the team and his eventual fiancée.
Still, things go badly, until an offhand remark by a woman in a bar makes Turing realise a way to speed up the machine’s activity. Eureka!
The story gets more interesting when the team realises it must keep its breakthrough a secret, lest the Nazis figure it out and change their code. They then enter into a painful calculus: what decrypted information can be used and what cannot – and hence which lives can be saved and which must be sacrificed?
There are surely numerous narrative shortcuts taken here. There’s also one of those slogan-type lines that seems far too tongue-trippingly clunky to be uttered by one character, let alone two: “Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
Yet there is truth to it. Turing’s story is indeed hard to imagine. Thanks to Cumberbatch’s committed performance, a lot more people will know it.
