"The Imitation Game"

The primary risk posed by biographic films about persecuted people – aside from the usual quibbles I have previously expressed about the genre – is to make sententious hagiographies so concerned with making heroic martyrs of their subjects that the naturally complicated human beings behind them vanish altogether. Given how gay characters in mainstream cinema have risen from one-dimensional supporting players to eulogized victims, Alan Turing’s status as the greatest martyr of Britain’s old homophobic laws next to Oscar Wilde made The Imitation Game particularly susceptible to such childish trivialization. If one were to compare it with a trap, one might say that screenwriter Graham Moore (basing himself on a biography by Andrew Hodges) narrowly avoids it with a few scrapes to the leg, only to get nastily grazed by another one in the same gesture, resulting in a bloodied but steady film that hobbles its way into our hearts and minds looking a little worse for wear but still presentable.

Based on articles I have read on the matter, the most important thing to know about The Imitation Game is that the Alan Turing played so masterfully by Benedict Cumberbatch only resembles the real Turing in broad strokes: Both were shy mathematical geniuses who led a team of Britain’s top cryptographers on a successful top secret mission to crack the Nazi encryption device known as Enigma– thus allowing the Allied forces to anticipate their strikes and win the Second World War – only to later find themselves arrested and chemically castrated for the crime of having consensual sex with another adult male, and subsequently die of a presumed suicide in 1954. The greatest difference between the two lies in Graham Moore’s treatment of Turing’s eccentricity, shyness and workaholism, which some have speculated to be symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome: Following the rather popular trend of retroactively diagnosing famous scientific geniuses as being on the autistic spectrum in order to make them role models, Moore amplifies these traits to the point of turning Turing into a severely autistic man who is unable to understand humour or nuance, takes every sentence literally and displays neither awareness nor consideration for social etiquette – a particularly grave misstep in an institution so reliant on class as the British Armed Forces.

It’s a choice that provides Moore with easy dramatic conflict; the fictionalized Turing’s colleagues initially despise him for his perceived cold arrogance (in complete contradiction with the fairly pleasant individual described by their real-life equivalents) but rush to his defense when Commander Alastair Denniston (played by Charles Dance as an impatient obstructive bully) attempts to shut his project down and fire him (both this event and his hostility to Turing are entirely fabricated). More importantly and problematically, Moore’s exaggeration of Turing’s possible autism allows him to make both a correlative link with his homosexuality and a causal link of both with his genius. As he reminds the audience through dialogue three times, “Sometimes, it’s the people no-one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine”. Hence my earlier trap analogy: In his attempt to avoid reducing Turing to a mere gay martyr, Moore uses his possible autism to make him an insufferable nerd all while combining it with his homosexuality to make him a martyr for all outsiders. It’s an interesting proposition, but written in a way that explicitly connects lack of conformity with social and/or societal norms with genius, and thus reinforces the growing notion that “different” necessarily means “special”.

Such simplifications could easily have turned The Imitation Game into a British equivalent to A Beautiful Mind. Fortunately, Morten Tyldum, despite being Norwegian, directs his film with the kind of BBC-learned British classicism that revolves around the actors’ performances without using them as a crutch, constructed in a manner that connects every line, every glance, and every body movement directly with the mind of the viewer. It can prove a little too mechanical at times, but Tyldum never spells things out to the point of condescension. His direction is unprovocative but it accords itself seamlessly with Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting. Cumberbatch looks nothing like Turing but his casting proves to be the film’s greatest advantage in two ways: His unusual physique – particularly the contrast between his small blue eyes and the long thin face they ornate – combines a certain classical elegance with lizard-like features, making him simultaneously strange and appealing. In that sense, he not only perfectly suits Moore and Tyldum’s intent to transform Turing into a symbol of oppressed otherness, he lays it bare. But he also redeems the more questionable aspects of that approach by way of a devastatingly accurate representation of autism that, far from being a showy display of tics and mannerisms, is integrated as part of a greater whole; namely a representation of what it’s like to feel as though you’re living in a world that wasn’t made for you, populated by confusing people with an infuriating habit of using words without meaning exactly what they say, and whose contempt for you would only worsen if they knew that you preferred your own gender. This comes from an entirely biased perspective, but as a person with Asperger’s, I recognized a lot of myself in Cumberbatch’s Turing; particularly his eyes, always refusing to meet other people’s and always intently focused on either the task at hand or his own thought, and his habit of pausing to catch his breath mid-sentence before laboriously blurting out the word he was about to stumble on.

As soon as you accept the true nature of The Imitation Game’s Alan Turing, and connect it with Benedict Cumberbatch’s magnificent performance, the point of most historical liberties taken with both Turing’s personality and his work becomes clear. As such, the completely fictitious depiction of him being blackmailed into silence by Soviet spy John Cairncross (whom the real-life Turing almost certainly never met) for fear of being exposed as a homosexual, while still ethically questionable, finds a certain dramatic justification (and is later downplayed when both men are revealed to have been manipulated by MI6). Much less justified, however, are Tyldum and Moore’s more uninspired storytelling choices: Montages of British troops fighting and London’s civilian population in bomb shelters just to remind us of the war that’s going on (though to Tyldum’s credit, most of his transitory montages are composed of archive footage, which isn’t particularly original but is at least much less on-the-nose); the repeated use of the previously-mentioned phrase as a forced “inspirational” quote you expect to see on a Facebook post; the simplified dramatization of Turing’s final breakthrough as a “Eureka!” moment brought on by an unrelated offhand remark from an external party…

The Imitation Game’s many imperfections result from a common and rather preoccupying need to reduce life’s many mysteries and intricacies to easily-identifiable dramatic schemes. As a portrait of Alan Turing’s personality and work, the film’s inaccuracies go hand-in-hand with its safe and inoffensive choices (whereas the real Turing was comfortable enough with his sexuality to flirt and make passes at men, the film Turing seems so petrified at the idea of sex that his later conviction is almost shocking). As a dramatic period thriller, it is made entertaining by its cast and Morten Tyldum’s solid direction of them. As an illustration of the feeling of otherness, it isn’t nearly in the same league as Under The Skin but is nevertheless vivid and, in large part thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch, emotionally spot-on.