The Alan Turing biopic is superbly acted, but let down by its clichés
By F.S.
FOR a film about the man who arguably invented the computer, “The Imitation Game” feels appropriately, though disappointingly, robotic.
It shouldn’t. It ticks all the right boxes to seduce those who vote for awards: pretty, period detail, a thrilling wartime backdrop and an unlikely hero jailed under legislation that the modern West finds inhumane. It also features a stunning central performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the man who cracked Nazi codes at Bletchley Park in Britain, saving millions of lives, but who was later convicted of gross indecency for which he has since been officially pardoned. As Turing, Mr Cumberbatch is tortured but cavalier, brilliant but misunderstood. There is a subtleness to this portrayal that brings the man’s emotional detachment to the screen without the wallowing that might easily have accompanied it.
Yet there is something altogether too languid about this piece, which is weighed down by a script heavy with period film clichés and bad guys so caricatured that at points they resemble Disney villains.
We begin with a classic biopic preamble, fast-forwarding to the future, where Mr Turing’s home has been broken into. It is 1951 and one of the detectives called to the scene of the crime finds the professor altogether too eager for them to leave. Just what is the eccentric fellow hiding? There is, too, a prophetic mention of cyanide, the poison the disgraced academic will later use to commit suicide, after his prosecution under homosexuality laws and chemical castration.
From there, a dash back to the 1940s, where our charmless maths genius is offered a coveted spot on a team trying to crack the ostensibly uncrackable Enigma code used by the Germans, alongside another unlikely candidate Joan (Keira Knightley) who offers a bit of cheer amid the MI6 gloom. Others shun his company, as well as his suggestion of an intelligent machine to process calculations more quickly than the human brain. But Joan sympathises as another outsider—a woman doing a man’s role—and believes in Turing and his work.
Ms Knightley puts in a decent performance, but although her liveliness and Mr Cumberbatch’s studiously furrowed brow and spot-on air of awkward self-assurance work well, “The Imitation Game” elsewhere feels as though it has little depth; it struggles to say anything unexpected about its supporting characters. Mark Strong and Charles Dance (as a kind spook and a stern codebreaking chief respectively) are both fine actors, but their role here is to turn up, deliver lines so stereotypically English they could be used on “Downton Abbey” and leave again. They might well challenge Mr Turing’s mission, but they do not at any stage challenge the audience.
An earlier script allegedly included the mathematician and another man “tugging off each other’s clothes”. “We see something raw and real and truly human in Turing that we’ve never seen before,” the draft said, according to a writer for Sunday Times. “He’s not a machine after all.”
However, the film that audiences will now see has no such scene, focusing instead on Turing’s relationship with an attractive woman. It does make clear where his true feelings lie, but still, it all seems rather cowardly on Hollywood’s part, a marketing ploy to clean up a story about wartime bigotry with a pretty girl’s face. What does that say about tolerance today?
Hollywood prejudices aside, the script is weak, however much the actors try to imbue it with nuance. This is the first English-language film for the director, Morten Tyldum, the man behind the successful Norwegian thriller "Headhunters", and one wonders whether he is fully aware of just how hackneyed some of these characters are.
“The Imitation Game” is a perfectly serviceable biopic, with a strong premise and memorable performances. But one expects more with such a stellar cast and a real-life story crying out for more nerve.
