The Imitation Game Movie Review - Women's Agenda

The Imitation Game Movie Review

Wars aren’t won on the battle field, as they say, but in blood-free rooms where men — at least in the movies, and at least during the days when wars were actually winnable — move pieces across boards and pin things to maps on walls. There’s a couple of scenes that depict such old-time war strategizing in The Imitation Game, but World War II is very much a background event: this is a biopic of Alan Turing, one of British history’s most impressive overachievers.

The scientist, cryptanalyst, mathematician, philosopher, mathematical biologist, long distance runner and purported father of artificial intelligence (not a bad LinkedIn profile) spent his time during WWII constructing a huge proto-computer that helped him and his colleagues decrypt Enigma, the code the Nazis used to coordinate their movements. Once known, the Allied Forces were given a massive strategical advantage.

Historians peg the number of lives Turing potentially saved in the many millions, which director Morten Tyldum informs the audience of at the conclusion of his glossy dramatization. The film is a kind of imitation itself — of the man, his story, his legacy — played according to the rules of the Oscar bait biopic: don’t get bogged down in nuance; never let truth get in the way of a good story; and always end happily — or at least end inoffensively.

On that last point Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore find their greatest challenge, because Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) wasn’t exactly decorated as a war hero: there was no ticker tape parade, no state-funded funeral. In the early 1950s, his influence on WWII kept secret, Turing was found guilty of an archaic law against being homosexual and chemically castrated. In 1954 he was discovered dead from self-inflicted cyanide poisoning, eventually given a posthumous pardon in 2013.

The challenge at the heart of The Imitation Game — how to celebrate the man’s existence while acknowledging the inglorious circumstances that led to his death, and not have mainstream audiences shuffle out of the cinema as if they’ve just sat through a Lars von Trier film — was similar to what director Michael Cuesta confronted in 2014 conspiracy thriller Kill the Messenger. Jeremy Renner plays journalist Gary Webb, who uncovered shocking revelations about the CIA’s role in creating a crack epidemic in the US in the 1980s — only to be shamed, discredited and hung out to dry. His body was found dead from two gunshot wounds in 2004 (reportedly suicide) before Webb was eventually — again, posthumously — vindicated.

Cuesta’s film left a bitter taste; it was a story with no victories. You couldn’t even view it in the context of advancing a cultural or political purpose: the war on drugs never got any better, unlike, say, the civil rights movement, which has progressed marginally with time. His film also won’t be winning any Oscars.

To avoid audiences leaving on a bum note, Tyldum and Moore divvy The Imitation Game into three separate timelines (war, pre-war and post-war) so that the inspiring parts of Turing’s life can be regularly pushed to the fore and the last act doesn’t have to come on like a cocktail of depressants. Doing so reduces the film’s potential power, though it’s clear early on — from the soft glow of cinematographer Oscar Faura’s images to a neatly bundled screenplay strewn with stagey philosophical lines and narrative contrivances, including a daffy lightbulb moment when, ah-ha, the protagonist finally realises the ingredient missing from his super machine — that it was never intended as a fiery polemic.

After being reluctantly hired as a codebreaker by Commander Denniston (veteran Charles Dance, always great as a crooked authority type) the shy genius goes about building a huge code-breaking contraption he calls Christopher, lined with colourful buttons and dials connected with thick red wires. The script doesn’t provide anything beyond the vaguest explanation of his approach to building the machine, so precious little can be learned of Turing’s methodology. The film is more concerned with painting him as a kooky outsider.

The Imitation Game often sidesteps its subject’s homosexuality; Cumberbatch’s enormously entertaining performance, full of small pleasures, feels almost asexual. But the film isn’t quite a toothless tiger. Scenes set during Turing’s later days, when he is confronted and prosecuted by police, alone and unknown to the public, carry a punch despite being softened by borderline schmaltzy dialogue. It’s almost a shame The Imitation Game is based on (or inspired by) real events. It’s highly palatable pap, with a fuzzy heart that belies — if not in story, then certainly in tone — the terrible injustice at the heart of it.

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