A disparate set of mismatched components stitched together to form a coherent whole. That’s either a description of the machine at the heart of this worthy biopic or a loose critique of Headhunters director Morten Tyldum’s examination of one of history’s most overlooked heroes. It is in fact both.
Even if you’re not au fait when it comes to your WWII trivia, most people have heard of the Enigma machine, a Nazi coding device used to send wartime communication to the evil spreading its doctrine of hate and murder across a crumbling Europe. The smartest minds couldn’t decipher the machine, one which self corrected every 24 hours in order to reset its own rules. Everyone except the remarkable mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Obtuse and unable to connect with those around him, Turing nevertheless had a beautiful mind, one which made the military’s reluctance to take him on a moot point.
His team, who he was allowed to hand pick after writing a letter to Winston Churchill, despised his methods and personality, with Matthew Goode’s Hugh Alexander taking particular chagrin to his painstaking work methods.
History books will tell you how things turned out, but if you don’t know then The Imitation Game does its best to make the slow turning of cogs a very tense exercise in warfare.
The real interest comes in the enigma behind the Enigma, because Turing was a man hiding more than just government secrets. In a time when it was against the law to be homosexual, and despite being married to Keira Knightley’s co-cracker Joan Clarke, he was persecuted, regardless of him being responsible for saving 14 million potential casualties of war.
Much like Tyldum’s breakout thriller, this has a surprisingly welcome streak of humour running throughout. An early sequence during which Charles Dance’s commander interviews Turing for the job is a verbal volley of one-liners.
You might be expecting a stiff upper lip factual drama along the lines of Tinker Tailor, but The Imitation Game plays out like a Jerry Bruckheimer film with brains.
There are the meet-the-gang sequences, the clichéd training montages which juxtapose Turing hunched over his desk scribbling away with scenes of him running in a frenzied fashion, and the slow-mo celebratory scenes of the finale. Heck, it’s hard not to think that Matthew Goode’s caddish naysayer is the “Iceman” to Cumberbatch’s “Maverick”. This is in no way decrying the qualities of the film, just indicating that it’s a lot more fun that you would imagine.
As expected, the cast do a stellar job. Cumberbatch is in his element playing an insular soul at odds with the world. It’s only a sidestep from characters he has played in the past, but awards recognition is inevitable.
Knightley is delightful as the defiant woman in a man’s world, even if, somewhat ironically, she is under-served by the script as the story progresses.
The narrative focus of the film is the major flaw. The story seems to crack once the code has been cracked, rushing through aspects of Turing’s post-war reprisals without allowing the weight of the injustice to hit home with the audience.
The demise of his marriage, his arrest for lewd conduct, and his ultimate fate are either condensed to a couple of scenes or left as frustrating end credit title cards.
For a story with the potential to deliver a powerful emotional wallop, it focuses too much on the history over the humanity.
Alexander Desplat’s score leaves an indelible mark, and Tyldum has made a sturdy looking film with some neat touches – like the coffee ring stain on the reams of indecipherable code – but there are too many deviations into mediocrity, such as the twee Sherborne School flashbacks and the unforgivable plot device of having someone drop a stack of papers only to discover a huge plot twist while picking them up.
This is a thoroughly engrossing, if not entirely focused, telling of a tale that is important for so many reasons, but one that leaves you wanting more of a dissection of the man behind the machine, despite the uniformly great performances.
‘The Imitation Game’
Director: Morten Tyldum
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Matthew Beard, Allen Leech
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Release date: Nov. 21
3 stars out of 5
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