Watching The Imitation Game was kind of a weird experience. It was a movie I really enjoyed, but it also left me feeling really depressed. The Alan Turing biopic is, at its heart, a movie about identity and the destructive nature of secrets.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, a genius mathematician and the father of theoretical computer science. Turing was a super smart dude, and like most movies, The Imitation Game struggles to visually represent genius. That’s where Cumberbatch excels in this role. Generally speaking, I find BC to be over-rated (although I love Sherlock). I was floored by his performance in this movie, though. The props department lets the viewer know that Turing was really fucking smart by showing us some complicated looking papers sloppily pinned to a cork-board. Cumberbatch sells Turing’s awkward genius with a nuanced, multi-level performance (more on that later).
The movie jumps between three separate events in Turing’s life–his boyhood realization of his homosexuality and his love of cryptography while at boarding school, his work decoding the enigma machine during WWII, and his arrest for sexual deviancy in 1951.
Most of the action takes place during the war years. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, Turing was part of a group of mathematicians and cryptographers who worked at Bletchley Park in a top-secret program to decode the German enigma machine. Basically Satan’s typewriter, the enigma machine was believed to be nearly unbreakable, and it changed codes daily. While the other members of the team tried to break each day’s individual code, Turing decided to apply his theoretical work on computer science to the problem. He built the Turing Machine, the model for the general computer, which could crack each day’s code quickly and accurately.
But that’s the dry history. In the movie we see Turing struggle to articulate his idea to his peers and superiors, his condescending and isolated personality alienating the people he needs on his side in order to succeed. This is where Cumberbatch really shines. As the movie progressed, I wasn’t sure that Turing’s anti-social behaviors was a product of his lack of social awareness or a defense mechanism keeping other people at bay.
During the flashbacks to Turing’s childhood we see him as he meets Christopher, his only friend at a school where he’s bullied mercilessly. Christopher introduces Turing to cryptography, and their friendship blossoms into an achingly sweet first love. Alex Lawther is amazing as a young man who is realizing his homosexuality by slow degrees.
The film leads the audience to believe that that first relationship profoundly influenced Turing’s life, his inability or unwillingness to connect to others, and his fascination with artificial intelligence.
Turing keeps his sexuality a secret, since it was against the law, and as the movie progresses, we see how secrets slowly chew away at him. He forms a relationship with another genius, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), as much to protect himself as to protect her reputation as a woman working alone with the cryptographers.
There’s a genuine love there, but I think this was the one part of the movie that didn’t work at all for me. Joan is a genius in her own right, but in the movie she’s reduced to Turing’s Manic Pixie DreamGirl. Give the boys apples to make friends! Don’t be so mean, Alan! She’s a device for his character growth, and not a character in her own right.
Turing also has to hide his work at Bletchley Park. When they crack enigma (that’s not a spoiler, that’s history, ok?) Turing and his group apply statistical analysis to taking actions against the Nazi plans they’ve uncovered. If the Allies had simply acted on all intelligence, the Germans would have realized enigma had been broken and moved on to a new device or method. That gruesome math, making decisions that would avoid saving hundreds or thousands of lives at time, ate away at Turing.
Secrets pile on top of secrets on top of secrets–Turing’s sexuality, his work cracking enigma, then his work deciding which messages are acted on, counter-intelligence involving the Russians… Turing starts to unravel. By the time the film jumps to the 50’s it’s clear that Turing is exhausted, cynical, and uncertain as to whether he is a war hero or a criminal.
But the real heartache comes when Turing is arrested and charged with sexual deviancy, and forced to endure chemical castration rather than a prison sentence. In one moment all his genius and hard work is reduced to a judgement against his sexual orientation. His contributions to math, to computer science, to the shaping of the 21st century (he literally saved Great Britain) are stripped away because he touched another man’s penis.
It’s heart-breaking because it’s true. Turing’s story has a tragic end. Played so sympathetically by Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game felt to me less like a movie you see for enjoyment, and more of a movie you see to remind yourself of why we need to be better.
The Imitation Game is in theatres now, and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.
Yes that sums up nicely how I felt about the movie as well, it was very bittersweet and the ending was heartbreaking given that the work Turing was doing is the reason I can sit her at 11.20pm NZ time and type on a computer thats viewing this website via the internet and post to this site. My heart breaks for the thought of what ELSE he could have accomplished had he not been persecuted the way that it played out – maybe we would have had Star Trek?
I read an interesting review of the movie by someone who was intimately familiar with the biography and apparently Turing himself was quite charismatic figure and a bit of a wag at times and he was quite unimpressed with the representation in the movie.
Having given it some thought tho, audiences could relate more to a tortured genius who clearly has challenges relating to people rather than to a brilliant man who may have come across as a bit of a prat instead? Not sure but I loved Cumberbatch in this role.
It was a shame about the Joan storyline but given the views on women at the time it may well have been real how she was treated. I did like that scene where she was late to the test and the guy wanted to send her to secretarial trials instead, and Turing didn’t care at all that she was there, just that she was late and disturbing his peace and serenity 🙂
There were some nice moments between them and it was a strong performance from Knightley
I loved this movie (review at http://thearmchaircritic.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-imitation-game.html ) I thought Cumberbatch’s peformance was brilliant: a man who simply thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, so he blindly antagonized everywone even when he needed them. And while I don’t know if Knightley deserved a Best Supporting Actress nomination, I thought her character’s situation paralleled Alan’s: both characters had their talents or achievements ignored because of superficial reasons. (“She’s a woman, so she can’t do mathematics! He’s gay, so who cares what he did to end the war!”) This one of my favorite movies of the year (a toss-up between this and SELMA).
I want to see this because the subject matter compels me and I do love BC. I have mixed feelings about it though because I do feel like in the patriarchal hollywood machine, this and The Theory of Everything with their focus on white-guy geniuses is shoving female centric films like Still Alice over to the side. I still want to watch it, I just have feelings about my own choices to continually watch these white guy is the hero movies. I applaud the fact that this one draws attention to the horrors perpetrated on homosexuals by our culture, though.
I struggled with this movie i agree there were good representations of genius, but the representation of history made me want to scream. the breakthrough moment when they suddenly began cracking everything? not quite. I went through a spate of code cracking history enthusiam, and there was a lot more to the story. i know that things were simplified for a more coherent narrative, but i hate that the real history will be ignored as a result.
Although I knew from The New York Review of Books review and the Slate review that this movie took liberties with the facts, I still ended up spending about 2/3 of the movie seething. Even without the factual issues pointed out in the review, many of which were the things that got my blood boiling (like the automatic and incorrect stereotyping of a mathematics expert as an arrogant narcissistic extreme-Asberger’s antisocial loner), the script taken as pure fiction has problems. For example, it’s ridiculous to think that the army would have shelled out £100,000 on a code-breaking machine and then immediately turned around and wanted to destroy it when it didn’t solve the problem right away, and the attempt at heart-tugging with one of the code-breakers having a brother on a doomed ship based on the first message they ever decode was insulting to the audience. The idea of Turing of all people anthropomorphizing a computer he built as his only consistent friend was also annoying.
I’m more outraged about the misleading portrayal of Turing’s life and personality than I am about its misrepresentation of the Enigma project, but only just. (And if I were a relative of the military commander Denniston, who is portrayed as a rigid venomous Philistine when actually he himself was a cryptanalyst and supportive of the project, I’d be really upset too.) It’s distressing that many people will take the movie as fact about both Turing and the Bletchley Park code-breaking efforts. IMHO, the only reason to see it is Benedict Cumberbatch’s terrific performance.
A movie which oozes Britishness from every frame, The Imitation Game is an instant classic. Wartime Britain is depicted vividly, if a little caricatured, with an autumnal palette and a jaunty air.
A true story, sympathetically told, with good performances all round and a stand-out Turing from the indefatigable Mr Cumberbatch. The young Turing is also extremely wA movie which oozes Britishness from every frame, The Imitation Game is an instant classic. Wartime Britain is depicted vividly, if a little caricatured, with an autumnal palette and a jaunty air.
A true story, sympathetically told, with good performances all round and a stand-out Turing from the indefatigable Mr Cumberbatch. The young Turing is also extremely well realised by Alex Lawther.
Meandering through Alan Turing’s life since school until shortly before his death, the script demands your attention and regularly makes you smile.
Highly recommended.ell realised by Alex Lawther.
Meandering through Alan Turing’s life since school until shortly before his death, the script demands your attention and regularly makes you smile.
Highly recommended.
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