The Imitation Game

Film (2014)

With Benedict Cumberbatch (Alan Turing), Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke), Matthew Goode (Hugh Alexander), Charles Dance (Commander Denniston), Rory Kinnear (Detective Robert Nock), Allen Leech (John Cairncross), Matthew Beard (Peter Hilton)

In 1939, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a brilliant English mathematician of twenty-seven interested in cryptanalysis, was enlisted to partake in a project to decode the immensely elusive Nazi Enigma code. He rapidly took charge of his branch of the effort and, with the help of a small but talented team at the then secretive Bletchley Park, including Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), saw it to its completion.

Turing was homosexual, which at that intolerant time ultimately led to Turing’s conviction on charges of gross indecency, punishment by chemical castration, and suicide at the age of forty-one.

This beautifully written, acted and directed account of Turing’s life and work is a pleasure to watch.

Benedict Cumberbatch, a remarkably agile and versatile actor, here renders Turing’s curiously complex character with a subtlety and pathos that is at once extremely compelling, yet regarded by some as a departure from fact.

At once supremely confident in his intellectual capacities and his vision of a solution to the Enigma challenge, Cumberbatch’s Turing is right on the edge of Aspberger’s Syndrome, barely able to notice social cues, isolated, withdrawn, abstracted. Some historical accounts of Turing yield a more sociable portrait, and certainly paint a picture of one who was not as fastidiously uptight as is Cumberbatch’s portrayal.

Cumberbatch does convey, with effective intensity, the sense of a desperately secretive homosexual whose passionate life dwells in a hidden and forbidden realm.

Whether the portrait is accurate or not, Cumberbatch is really amazing. If you’ve seen him in Sherlock(2010- ), a wittily contemporary television adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes tales, you will have seen his capacity for utter panache and sangfroid at work.

That panache vividly comes forth in Cumberbatch’s portrayal, certainly insofar as Turing conveys the same kind of supreme intellectual confidence, but there is also something so effectively wounded about the portrayal that makes the it heartbreaking as well as brash.

Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke) is also extremely good. She can be a top notch actress, as she demonstrated in Pride and Prejudice (2005) and in Atonement (2007). Here, her work is intelligent, poised, sensitive, and right on the mark. The unfolding of her story as a mathematician on the Enigma team and her consequent personal relationship with Turing is beautifully detailed and, in the mix of her growing recognitions of Turing’s talents and personal predilections, her deft, subtle and poignant rendering adds to the overall heartbreak.

Some may remember Charles Dance (Commander Denniston), here as the grouchily oppressive Royal Navy officer in charge of the project, from The Jewel In The Crown (1984), the compelling British television adaptation of The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott. There he was young, charming and idealistic. Here, he is older and meaner, but still very good.

The support cast – including Allen Leech (John Cairncross) familiar from television’s immensely popular Downton Abbey – is fine all around.

The production design is right on, especially in the rendering of the Enigma machine, Turing’s electromechanical invention for solving the code which, in many ways, could be considered the first modern computer. Its haltingly spinning wheels are hypnotic, and the drama of waiting them to wind down to their final calculation gripping.

– BADMan