One of this year’s Best Picture nominees and you can sure tell because it feels like “Oscar Bait” should be the unofficial subtitle. Although, between this and Britain’s other prestige “Oscar Bait” movie, The Theory of Everything, I liked this one a lot more.
“The Imitation Game” is square and old-fashioned, but always just a little bit more sly and subversive than you think it’s going to be. And how can it not since it’s hero is the unheralded champion of WWII but was also arrested for being a homosexual.
What Works: Benedict Cumberpatch plays Allen Turing, a genius mathematician recruited during WWII to help try to break Germany’s infamous Enigma code. The British can intercept the messages off the machines, but they can’t break the code, and Germany resets the code at midnight so that anything the British team does one day becomes moot the next.
While his team decides to waste their hours trying to crack the individual codes—and what good would that do when they can’t read the next day’s codes?—Turing/Cumberpatch decides to build a machine that will decipher the codes everyday. You almost can’t believe the amount of resistance he encounters for what seems like a no-brainer idea, but then again computers hadn’t been invented yet, and one of Turing’s most lasting accomplishments was building a prototype for a computer. Scenes of Turing and his team (which includes Matthew Goode and Keira Knightley) are intercut with a post-war detective’s investigation into Turing’s homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. The film seems to be suggesting that only a man who had to live in secret everyday of his life could crack the secrets of others…
What Doesn’t: …And that’s all well and good, but the movie might have wanted to point out the hypocrisy of an England that was fighting for freedom but also jailed 49,000 men for homosexuality (as the movie tells us). In a post-script, the film says “Turing was posthumously pardoned by the Queen in 2012 for his many accomplishments.” Well, that’s mighty big of her, waiting until a time when homosexuality has been legal for forty five years to grant a worthless pardon to a man who did more than anyone to win WWII. It’s a sad reminder that Turing never got any credit for his work while he was alive, and nearly every character on screen seems to hate him. The film barely seems to acknowledge this, and goes out of its way to sidestep controversy, refusing to show Turing even hug another man. It’s like an angry mob celebrating a guy after they’ve hung him.
And even though Cumberpatch is excellent as always, I’m a little surprised that this is his most heralded role to date since Turing—in the movie—is so implosive he’s something of a limited character. He alternates between being subtly rude and outright pitiful, but he rarely gets angry. You keep waiting for his one big explosion scene, but it never comes. I think the film needed to make more of an effort to put you inside his head than it does.
What I Would Have Done Differently: For a film about a hero who had to hide his homosexuality and then was ultimately persecuted for it, the film is very ambivalent to show us that aspect of his life. And even beyond that, not enough of an effort is made to dig deeper into the way Turing’s mind works or how he designed his machine or any of his ideas really. Since this is the first war movie in ages to be set almost entirely in moldy rooms far removed from battle, this is even more of a problem. Without the stakes of life or death action, character depth is really all you have.
All in all, this is an agreeable but dated WWII movie that really could have been made anytime in the last few decades or so (like “The King’s Speech” but a little more exciting) and even though I liked it, it’s also a great sign that it’s being largely left-out of the Oscar conversation for more exciting, daring work like “Boyhood” and “Birdman.” Grade: B