The Imi­ta­tion Game

World War Two code-break­ers! A dra­mat­ic true sto­ry! Peri­od suits and tea dress­es! Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch! Keira Knight­ley! Plum­my accents! Ham­my dia­logue! The ingre­di­ents and trap­pings of direc­tor Morten Tyldum’s The Imi­ta­tion Game are gid­dy to the point of dis­trac­tion. But what lies beneath? The sto­ry of Alan Tur­ing — maths genius, nation­al hero and clos­et­ed homo­sex­u­al — doesn’t so much lie beneath as bat­tle for dom­i­nance. His sto­ry is inter­est­ing and wor­thy but the film­mak­ing works like a fren­zied crim­i­nal throw­ing obsta­cles in the path of those try­ing to follow.

Which isn’t to say that Cum­ber­batch as Tur­ing is any less per­fect than one might imag­ine giv­en his proven abil­i­ty at play­ing inge­nious out­siders. His por­tray­al of the rude and jus­ti­fi­ably arro­gant Cam­bridge grad­u­ate is pitched to hit com­ic extremes. This is epit­o­mised when he announces in his Bletch­ley Hall inter­view: ​“Moth­er says I can be off-putting some­times, on account of being one of the best math­e­mati­cians in the world.”

Charles Dance as the pierc­ing-eyed Com­man­der Den­nis­ton is not amused or charmed. Tyl­dum is inter­est­ed in cream­ing off and cal­cu­lat­ing the extent to which peo­ple require social grace served with their encoun­ters. It’s a shame that screen­writer Gra­ham Moore (who adapt­ed Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biog­ra­phy, ​‘Alan Tur­ing: The Enig­ma’) rou­tine­ly strives to find com­e­dy in the awk­ward­ness as it dilutes the ten­sion, turn­ing the pic­ture from a seri­ous dra­ma to a dra­mat­ic irony-dri­ven com­e­dy doing a dis­ser­vice to the place where the sto­ry ulti­mate­ly ends.

But this trag­ic infor­ma­tion is saved till the last. The major­i­ty of the film is con­cerned with the jol­ly-hock­ey-sticks team-build­ing shenani­gans that ensue when Tur­ing is assigned to crack the Enig­ma code. He is also charged with build­ing a team that includes — gasp — a woman, Joan (Knight­ley), hand­some, rea­son­able sort, Hugh (Matthew Goode), shifty, world­ly type, John (Allen Leech) and young sweet­heart, Peter (Matthew Beard). His trou­bles are shown to be split four-ways, between the Ger­mans, his team­mates, the com­mand and a for­ma­tive school­boy rela­tion­ship revealed in the most misty-eyed of flashbacks.

While it is doubtless­ly Cum­ber­batch who will pick up the biggest acco­lades for his stud­ied and seri­ous per­for­mance, Keira Knight­ley as Joan pro­vides a much-need­ed dose of warmth and sense. Her spir­it­ed and intel­li­gent per­for­mance is fil­tered through a hes­i­tance that comes from know­ing that her char­ac­ter could be side­lined at any moment on account of her gen­der. The chem­istry that flick­ers between she and Cum­ber­batch is nur­tur­ing and indul­gent. It is she that nurs­es the plot along by help­ing her friend to devel­op the skills to work with oth­er people.

There are inter­est­ing ideas at work in the pre­sen­ta­tion of Turing’s strug­gles. Social inter­ac­tion is pre­sent­ed as the most intri­cate of codes. (It’s true that peo­ple usu­al­ly hint at rather than stat­ing exact­ly what they mean.) How­ev­er, despite the chest-beat­ing pres­tige pic­ture cre­den­tials inher­ent in Turing’s sto­ry, it seems that Tyl­dum and his col­lab­o­ra­tors want audi­ences to take the film seri­ous­ly but not that seri­ous­ly. Dra­mat­ic reveals occur in the most hilar­i­ous­ly con­trived fash­ion and tri­umphant zingers like, ​“Love just lost Hitler the war!” nev­er cease to jolt your head out of the nar­ra­tive and into your palm.

Every­one involved in this pro­duc­tion has talked about the impor­tance of bring­ing Alan Tur­ing to the lime­light. There has been some suc­cess in this regard. It’s just not clear whether this tongue-in-cheek effort does jus­tice to the most mys­te­ri­ous and math­e­mat­i­cal of men.