CINEMA War-entangled

The film would be best enjoyed by a viewer who knows nothing about the main character, as various inaccuracies have been noted

Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch Joan Clarke and Alan Turing were fellow outsiders n the run-up to the Oscars, The Imitation Game — a biopic based on the tragedy of the great mathematician and computer pioneer, Alan Turing — has achieved eight nominations. Yet it has been most savagely attacked, torrentially criticised as inaccurate and (as The Guardian has put it) a “new slander” on Turing’s reputation.

It’s easy to see why it has beguiled audiences: a subtle, gracefully tormented performance by Cumberbatch as Turing; strong ensemble performances by his colleagues at the wartime codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park; and an intense examination of gay outsiders under the British laws against “gross indecency” or homosexuality.

Now excised from the system, those punitive laws have gone — and Turing received a royal pardon from the queen in 2013, years after his suicide in 1954 (he was 41). About 49 000 men (including Oscar Wilde) were prosecuted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and their collective disgrace remains on the record.

These blurred facts are the basis of swelling popular esteem for Turing; but since his death was relatively recent, he has his opponents, and not just homophobes. The Imitation Game is a pleasing, middlebrow movie entangled in these wars.

The viewer is best off knowing nothing about Turing. But several contemporaries and heirs to his mathematical legerdemain have pounced:

Turing was not solely responsible was to build a digital computer, and other scientists (following him) achieved that.

In the film Turing discovers a Soviet agent in his crew. When he is warned that revelation of this secret would lead to a revelation of Turing’s sexual proclivities, he weakens and (certainly at first) gives in. Hence The Guardian’s accusation of slander, since that would make Turing a traitor, not a victim.

Among Turing’s coterie and supervisors (Knightley, Goode, Leech, Beard, and Dance are there in a confusing amalgam) it’s the woman who makes the greatest impact. The suspicion arises that this is the love interest, and certainly Turing did help the woman on whom Knightley’s crisp performance is based, probably because he saw her as a fellow outsider at Bletchley Park.

But Turing and Joan (as she was called) did have more than friendship in mind. They were briefly engaged, though Turing broke it off despite her indifference to his gayness. His punishment for “gross indecency” entailed hormone treatment, or “chemical castration”. Did it really drive him to suicide?

Despite the film’s close-knit portrait of a group struggling to attain the unattainable — all apparently knowing of and tolerating Turing’s eccentricities — the unravelling of the Enigma code, however momentous, seems unlikely to have shortened the war by two years and saved 10m soldiers.

Do see the film as an exercise in historical drama. My selective doubts are in that sense irrelevant. Peter Wilhelm

pcwilhelm@telkomsa.net