If you’re looking for a crowd-pleaser among the handful of films released nationally on Christmas Day, look no further than The Imitation Game. Benedict Cumberbatch gives one of the year’s best performances as the genius dork with zero social skills and a heavy dose of what we would now recognize as Asperger-like traits. Appealing in an unconventional way, Turing is lovable for his directness, his candor, and his wit. He’s an odd mix of detachment and hyper vigilance. His obsessiveness seems entirely inner-directed as if he is responding to a mysterious force within himself. Not afraid to insult those who are his intellectual inferiors, he also constantly gets himself in trouble.
Focused on deciphering Nazi codes, Turing finds himself at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, joining a team of Enigma Project code breakers, who thus far have had little luck in succeeding. Turing immediately builds a towering, whirring machine–actually a very early computer. He names it Christopher, after a childhood boyfriend who appears in flashbacks. Directed by Morten Tyldum (the excellent Headhunters) with a screenplay by Graham Moore, the film also flashes forward to a time in 1952 when Turing is interrogated after being arrested for indecency. Although the rest of the world would not find out about Turing’s heroics until the 1970s, he spills his story to the interrogating policeman, who, we are to believe, accidentally stumbles across the incident of “indecency” while investigating Turing as a possible spy with Soviet sympathies. (While the United States was fully engaged in leading the way in the witch hunting of McCarthyism, Great Britain was actually jailing thousands for homosexuality.)
Let’s get a few fact-checked, roll-your-eyes scenes out of the way:
1) The film takes poetic license in depicting Turing as having received a breakthrough moment after writing no less than Winston Churchill himself a plea to allow TurIng to proceed with his plans despite skepticism from his immediate supervisors. (False.)
2) Turing and his gang reach an eureka-moment at a pub after an innocent comment from a secretary provides the missing clue to crack the codes. (Also false, but great fun as the normally reticent motley crew celebrate their breakthrough.)
3) The member of Turing’s crew who proved to be a spy for the Russians was never a member of Turing’s group. (Another whopper, but also one that compresses events in a manner that allows the film to address a very immediate problem during the war.)
4) Christopher was actually named Victory and wasn’t nearly as huge and silly-looking as the one in the film. (What’s wrong with stretching the truth in the name of film visuals–especially if they’re also funny?)
Turing’s relationship with fellow cryptanalyst Joan Clark (a very good Keira Knightley) provides the film with a rock-solid subtext. Plagued with prejudices brought against her for being a woman (she, for instance, was not permitted access to classifies material), her fight against her predicament nicely parallels Turing’s own struggle with oppression directed at his homosexuality. While The Imitation Game is often slick or awkward, their relationship soars above the film’s occasional lapses into simplemindedness. When all is said and done The Imitation Game captures the spirit of a man who personally shortened the war by months if not years–only to find tragic, and unnecessary, payback.
A Tragic War Hero You Need To Discover…4 (out of 5) stars