A CRACKER OF A PART, A BELTER OF AMOVIE
Benedict Cumberbatch is beguilingly brilliant as the tortured genius who unlocked the secret of the Nazis’ Enigma machine... and won the war
The Imitation Game is a very good film, of that there’s no doubt. It’s exciting, intriguing, moving and wonderfully accessible, with the last of these qualities being both surprising and welcome given that the subject is the top-secret, nigh-on-impossibleto-understand code-breaking work that went on at Bletchley Park during World War II.
So full marks to director Morten Tyldum and novelist Graham Moore, who adapts from Andrew Hodges’s biography, for at least giving us the illusion, albeit temporarily, that we understand what is going on.
But even better than their efforts is Benedict Cumberbatch’s central performance as Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who led the effort at Bletchley. He turned the course of the war with his success. Yet he committed suicide in 1954, two years after pleading guilty to a charge of gross indecency and accepting, as part of his sentence, chemical castration to control his homosexuality.
Cumberbatch is simply wonderful as the fastidious Turing, who these days would probably be described as ‘somewhere on the spectrum’. Jokes, women, lunch breaks… these are concepts unknown to him. But give him a challenge involving advanced mathematics – like, say, breaking the Germans’ Enigma machine with its 159 million million million possible settings – and he’s absolutely your man.
‘It’s uncrackable,’ warns Commander Denniston (an icy Charles Dance), the naval officer in charge of Bletchley who has taken an instant dislike to the eccentric new arrival from Cambridge.
‘Let me try and we’ll know for sure,’ replies Turing, who can barely look his superior in the eye and yet has no problem calling himself ‘one of the greatest mathematicians in the world’.
No doubt there’s a little screenplay-writer’s licence at work here, but Cumberbatch brings the highly polished, at times almost stylised, dialogue to life in a quiet yet totally captivating and convincing way. From the moment his beguiling voiceover begins – ‘If you’re not paying attention you will
miss things – important things’ – we’re gripped. Yes, there are distant echoes of his performance as television’s Sherlock (another genius, of course) but there’s a vulnerability here – hinted at by the tiniest suggestion of camp and Turing’s tendency to stammer at moments of high stress – that we haven’t seen before. The other
great asset that The Imitation Game (the title is taken from a paper Turing wrote after the war about the difference between man and a calculating machine) is context. The Bletchley story has been told before, not least in the 2001 film Enigma, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, as has Turing’s own story in the 1996 TV drama Breaking The
Code, starring Derek Jacobi. But the world has moved on since both those productions, particularly in terms of technology, and while Bletchley’s magnificent contribution to the war effort and the tragedy of Turing’s personal life quite rightly still share centre stage, this is the first film that portrays Turing as the father of the computer age.
The laptops, tablets and smartphones that are now part of our lives all owe a significant debt to the calculating machine – Turing nicknamed it Christopher after his first schoolboy crush – that he built.
His part-admiring, part-resentful colleagues – led by the handsome chess-player Hugh Alexander, played here by Matthew Goode – may work frantically each day before the Enigma machine resets itself at midnight, forcing them to start again from scratch, but somehow Turing knows instinctively that ‘only a machine could defeat another machine’.
Another over-polished line? Well, perhaps, and there’s no doubt that the film fairly drips with historical hindsight. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to be rather good at this,’ says his schoolboy chum, handing him his first book on cryptology.
In other circumstances, such an approach could annoyingly break the story’s spell but here it doesn’t, partly because it is so well-intentioned and deserved (Turing was granted a posthumous royal pardon as recently as last year), partly because the underlying story is such a good one and partly because of the quality of the performances.
Keira Knightley has had a terrific year and she rounds it off superbly as Joan Clark, the gifted mathematician and crossword whizz who had to overcome the sexism of the time to work alongside Turing and his male colleagues.
Notonly is Knightley’s old-fashioned beauty the perfect period foil to Cumberbatch’s chiselled but slightly otherworldly good looks, but she has the confidence to deliver the whole thing in now much mocked Received Pronunciation, cut glass vowels and all. It’s not quite Celia Johnson in
Brief Encounter but it’s close and unexpectedly effective.
The film also has Dance – who’s moved from handsome lead to one of the best character actors in the business – on top form, Mark Strong impressing as the man from MI6 and Rory Kinnear finding an unexpected humanity in the Manchester detective who inadvertently kick-starts Turing’s final decline.
The Imitation Game may not be perfect. However, it’s an important film and, alongside Pride
and Mr Turner, unmistakably must rank as one of the best films of the year.