Runtime: 1 hour, 54 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Morten Tyldum
Quick Impressions:
This is a much better movie than The Theory of Everything. At least, it’s more to my taste. I suppose I’m comparing the two projects because they’re both British films about true life academics who make great discoveries. I’m not suggesting that the historical Turing is superior to Hawking in some way, or that Eddie Redmayne doesn’t give a fantastic performance as pop culture’s favorite cosmologist. I just find this movie far more interesting. More happens. For most of the film, the plot is driven by the race against time by Turing and his colleagues to break the Nazi Enigma codes and help to end World War II. Not only are the stakes high, but the dialogue and character interactions are compelling. The principal characters say and do interesting, captivating things. I also quite liked Alexandre Desplat’s score. It fit the film tonally and helped to create a suspenseful mood. The music was lovely without being too showy or overpowering.
I can see why both Cumberbatch and Knightley are favored for Oscar nominations. Cumberbatch is absolutely brilliant here. His Turing definitely gives every indication of being somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and apparently Cumberbatch is at his best when playing characters who are not neurotypical. I like his performance because he portrays Turing as a markedly unusual individual without making him seem like a huge weirdo. (Too often when actors portray characters who are not ordinary, they go a little overboard and become so obsessed with portraying their character’s disability or atypical traits that the character’s personality—and often the film’s plot—somehow gets lost or ignored in all the drama.)
Keira Knightley is at her best here, too. She has the great advantage of playing an immensely sympathetic, well-written character who is given clever lines and intelligent, compassionate things to do. If this movie is any indicator, then Joan Clarke was a fascinating woman in her own right. I particularly like all the insight we’re given into her thought processes and motivations. (A weakness of Felicity Jones’s performance as Jane Hawking is the limiting material she’s given. Unfortunately we never learn much about Jane’s reasoning or motivations, which is truly frustrating since print interviews have led me to suspect that the real life Jane Hawking is a thoughtful and interesting woman.) Knightley benefits greatly from the well-developed, engaging-as-scripted character that she’s given. I would expect a Best Supporting Actresses nomination for her this year, and I’d say it’s thoroughly deserved.
The Good:
This is a movie about scientists/mathematicians called upon by their country to do some monumentally important work—and we actually get to see them doing that work. Their effort to break Enigma is the primary focus of the movie. So of course, the story is quite captivating and engaging because, I mean, the bombing of Britain is compelling stuff. The stakes are extremely high. All around Turing and his team people are dying every day, and people will continue dying until the top-secret team can break the codes and win the war.
Of course, there’s a separate, intertwined narrative advancing at the same time. While we’re learning about this great historical feat, we also get to see the tormented past and persecuted future of the highly complex Alan Turing.
Perhaps the film deserves a screenplay nomination. I’m definitely a fan of the structure. Instead of telling two separate stories—of Turing the hero and Turing the “criminal—in chronological order, the film makes the wise choice of presenting both storylines at once. This way, it can rise and fall along with the progress of the government project, which creates a story that is easy to watch. Otherwise, we’d get the big climax of the culmination of the team’s work, then have to suffer through the remaining thirty minutes of tagged on post-success persecution as the film gradually loses energy and focus. For this story, telling everything all at once works much better, particularly because that way the audience can consider the parts of the story as components of a related whole, a complete person.
By the way, the flashback scenes of Turing’s youth left me with two strong convictions. 1) The kid who plays the young Turing does a fantastic job. Keep an eye on young Alex Lawther. He’s definitely going places. His performance is almost as convincing as Cumberbatch’s. 2) I’m so glad I didn’t go to a British boys prep school. Seriously, if you ever want to feel really good about the state of American schools, just watch the flashback scenes in this movie. I mean sure, the teasing of kids who stand out is a pretty universal phenomenon, but good grief, they stuff him underneath the floor boards and nail him up and push furniture on top of him!? Who runs this prep school—Edgar Allan Poe?
As I’ve said, Cumberbatch and Knightley are fantastic, and there are some pretty great supporting performances as well. Charles Dance is a particular standout as the strangely likable (despite his bullheaded hostility to the protagonist) Commander Denniston. In his dignified bluster and increasingly unconcealed derision, Denniston is strangely reminiscent of Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. (All of this, “Have you ever won a war? Well, I have,” kind of stuff, the lofty tone, the obvious professional experience.) Dance is perfect in the role, and rather curiously, the character manages to be kind of likable even though he’s clearly wrong about Turing’s work and persists in needlessly making things more difficult for him.
I love Mark Strong, and he’s very good in his part, too. Strong has a knack for seeming sinister and suave simultaneously, which always helps when you’re playing an MI-6 agent.
Before seeing The Imitation Game, I knew almost nothing about Alan Turing. I knew his name, of course, and that he was a computer pioneer. And I’m familiar with the widespread anecdote about Churchill making the tough decision to let a village get bombed rather than to reveal that the British had cracked the Germans’ codes. But I knew absolutely none of the details of how Turing and the rest of the team worked to solve Enigma. And until listening to some interviews with Benedict Cumberbatch a few weeks before seeing the film, I had absolutely no inklings of Turing’s homosexuality or the government’s almost bizarrely punitive response.
I suppose I’ll now have to do some serious reading about Alan Turing. (I’m also very curious about Joan Clarke. Romances are often built up and thrown in to enhance biopics for the screen, so I’d love to know more of the facts of this woman’s life.) I’ve heard some complaints that the film is not completely historically accurate, and I mean, frankly I’d be stunned if it were completely accurate. Biopics never are. (I’m rather suspicious about the origin of the name of the computer and Turing’s tortured attachment to it. That seems very likely to be embroidered for maximum tear-jerk potential to me, especially given Turing’s apparently non-melodramatic personality. But honestly, I don’t know a thing about the actual events. I’ll have to do some reading.)
Strongly in the movie’s favor, however, is that it gives the audience a coherent idea of how Turing and his team worked during World War II. Surely the movie’s basic plot points are at least broadly true. And this is a part of history that isn’t often taught in schools (at least not American schools). We tend to hear a lot more about what happened on the battlefield (or in the concentration camps) than we ever do about the intellectuals/politicians working behind the scenes to hasten peace through strategy, diplomacy, espionage, and other such chicanery. The events in this film are genuinely interesting, chiefly because they’re not often told. I think the screenplay is quite well written in that it reveals and develops Turing’s character so thoroughly while briskly guiding us through the events of his professional life. Too often biopics indulge in long asides, probing the complexities of the protagonist while letting the plot stagnate.
Another great strength of the movie is Alexandre Desplat’s score. It killed me to learn that Birdman’s superb score was disqualified for Oscar consideration. As far as I’m concerned, that’s easily the year’s best score. (I was upset about the Black Swan score a few years ago, but that at least made sense. I really don’t get this, but the processes for selecting nominees for song, score, and foreign film are all very arcane and confusing to laypeople, if you ask me.) Anyway, I like this score, too. Maybe it will win an Oscar. It’s subtle and sets the perfect mood for the story. (That’s what I don’t like about The Theory of Everything’s much lauded score. It’s just so intrusive and grandstanding. If Hawking were a symphony orchestra conductor, I’d understand that choice. It’s lovely music, but I just think it doesn’t do a great job as a movie score.)
In short, The Imitation Game succeeds chiefly because it features captivating characters and a genuinely interesting, content heavy story. And the superb score doesn’t hurt.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s pretty hard to forget that stomping the floorboards scene of school room abuse, and I like the way that scene is juxtaposed with a later moment when Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) suddenly loses patience with Turing, snaps, and turns on him in violence.
Best Scene:
Then, of course, there’s the later scene when Charles Dance and the men in his command storm into the room and attack Turing. What happens here is a definite turning point in Turing’s story and is genuinely moving (so much so that it seems a bit contrived, and I find myself wondering if it really went down like that). The scene definitely works cinematically, though.
Another soaring scene is the eureka moment as the code is cracked.
Best Scene Visually:
We begin to appreciate the difficulty of the team’s job—the extreme sacrifices involved in winning war—through visual cues which emphasize the toll the war is taking on Britain. It’s absolutely chilling when Peter (Matthew Beard) looks at the map they assemble charting the position of ships an draws a terrifying conclusion. Moments later, we see Alan and Joan talking with Stewart Menzies. They reach an understanding about what must be done, but at the same moment, Joan happens to glance out the window at first hand evidence of the horror of war. In fact, various intercalary scenes regularly remind us how high the stakes are, how horrific the ramifications of delay.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Benedict Cumberbatch:
Cumberbatch does a great job throughout the film of convincing us that Turing is a prickly (though genuine), socially awkward genius who’s probably on the Autism spectrum somewhere without ever overplaying this.
He’s good in all his scenes, but I love his moment (broken up and inserted into the main narrative as several separate scenes) in the interrogation room with Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear). The film obviously knows this is one of its strongest scenes since we get these beautifully framed close-ups of Cumberbatch’s face as he delivers a quietly profound monologue. (This is also the sequence in which we learn the significance of the film’s title.)
What makes Cumberbatch’s performance so good is that he’s able to generate such intensity in scenes like this one, in which he’s basically just sitting there talking quietly.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Keira Knightley:
Keira Knightley’s Oscar chances are helped along greatly by the fact that she plays the attractive young character who is most sympathetic and kind to the troubled protagonist. The film portrays Joan Clarke as the colleague closest to being Turing’s intellectual equal yet without his social difficulties. Joan is kind and socially adept and very clever and helpful to Turing. I feel like it would take a special kind of atrocious actress to screw up a role like this. Fortunately, Knightley is a good actress who is often at her best in period pieces (where she excels at being not at all like the other women of that period).
Knightley is quite good in an early scene in the pub, and she gets to give a very impressive, impassioned speech in the late scene when Turing tries to send Joan home. In some ways, this scene is frustrating, but it’s that kind of very emotionally satisfying frustration and torment that movie audiences eat up with such relish.
The Negatives:
There’s something a bit too neat and contrived about the story as presented. That one line that gets passed back and forth…The third time I heard it, I thought, Good grief! What is this, Spiderman? I mean, “With great power comes great responsibility,” is a stirring line, too, but you can only hear it so many times before you start to become convinced that you’re living within a work of fiction.
Little things like this—the repeated line, the heavy-handed explanation of Turing’s work near the end, the name Alan gives the machine—drive home the point that the movie is obviously fiction. That’s okay because it’s not pretending to be a documentary or something. But at same time, I sat there alternating between thinking, This is so well crafted and This is too well crafted.
That’s really my only complaint. Sometimes verisimilitude is sacrificed for craft. Nothing true is ever that neat. And when it’s so easy to draw huge conclusions about what makes Turing tick and what we’re supposed to be taking from the story, then it’s all the more obvious that what we’ve been watching is just that—a story. Highly contrived.
Still I’d rather watch a well-crafted if contrived piece of fiction than a complete train wreck of random action lacking any logical focus or organization.
Overall:
The Imitation Game is a thoroughly engaging piece of historical fiction that introduces movie audiences to a character whose significant contribution to ending World War II has been marginalized and overlooked over the years. Benedict Cumberbatch gives a brilliant lead performance and thoroughly deserves the Best Actor nomination that he will likely get. Keira Knightley will probably get nominated, too, for her solid, sympathetic performance as Joan Clarke, a character The Imitation Game makes almost as intriguing as the fascinating and complex Alan Turing himself.