 |
| (The Weinstein Company) |
There was Newton, Darwin and then there was Alan Turing, a British code-breaker working against the Nazis who helped to pioneer the computer. Tim Cook – the openly gay CEO of Apple – has nothing on this man. So why have we hidden Alan Turing from the cinematic narrative of World War II for so long? Enigma – a 2001 film starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet – deals with the same events at Bletchley Park yet Alan Turing remained hidden in the closet. Barely over a year ago, Queen Elizabeth II issued her royal pardon to the wrongly persecuted Turing. Better late then never, I guess?
We are far from living in a world which embraces homosexuality. The Imitation Game is a reminder that gay lives matter, recognition from the government matters and any form of discrimination against gay people is akin to racism or anti-Semitism. The Allies are not the heroes in this film – they’re the persecutors. I’m never one to advocate for movies based on social relevance – but, in the case of this solid biopic, justice is served not only to Alan Turing but to gay people everywhere. The movie – in my “biased” interpretation – makes a case that governments are culpable in persecution, that the culture of heroism that came out of World War II was a morally bankrupt institution. This is should be quite controversial – but we accept it as a past already lived, not a present we are currently living.
Stephen Witty of the Newark Star Ledger wasn’t sold on The Imitation Game’s handling of Alan Turing’s homosexuality: “'The Imitation Game' is willing to take Turing out of the closet — but only as far as the hallway." It’s not totally unwarranted – Turing’s sex life is not openly displayed onscreen, with director Morten Tyldum instead exploring repression and isolation. But the movie is not Brokeback Mountain, where it would merit passionate displays of affection to tell its story; it’s about the mind – at a pivotal moment in the film, the detective investigating Turing asks him, “Can machines think?” He replies quite coarsely, “You’re asking the stupid question.” He goes on to give a stunningly insightful monologue about how machines, like people, think in different ways, and it’s impossible to comprehend how machines – like human brains – think. That’s the beauty of this biopic – for all it’s incessant clichéd metaphors and biopic-conventionalities, The Imitation Game manages to create a touching, heartfelt work about the capacities and oddities of the human mind and spirit.
Alan Turing is not a hero – in fact, he’s an egomaniac and narcissist. He blatantly uses Joan Clark (Keira Knightley, good not great) for his own purpose and tosses her away when he no longer needs her. It’s male-privilege, not at its worst, but nonetheless a reminder of the mobility men were capable of and women weren’t. But he’s a product of an environment: to survive, to accomplish what he wants to accomplish, he needs to fit in, he needs to play the imitation game (ka-ching!). But he’s not a genius who happens to be gay. It’s not peripheral. He’s a gay genius. In boarding school – which the film manages to weave within it’s narrative expertly – first love Christopher convinces him that he’s special. But, to his misfortune, he’ll never know if Christopher would have accepted that part of him which loved him. Turing awaited Christopher with a coded note in his hand and, later learned, he died of turbeculosis – a fact concealed from his friend. This is what drives him, the reason he names his machine Christopher, but what also makes him unable to connect with people.
Given the technical elements, it is really Cumberbatch’s performance which lifts this film to extraordinary heights. Considering all the Best Actor Oscar winners going as far as Jeff Bridges in 2009, Cumberbatch’s performance already knocks all of them out of the water. Played with ferocious detachment and stunning vulnerability, Cumberbatch is exceptional. His work is a study in subtlety even if the script isn’t. The arc we see him go through – from this self-assured, highly-capable young man to an older defeated version of himself who can’t even solve a cross-word puzzle – is heartbreaking, at the level of Julianne Moore’s Alice in terms of control and embodiment. The layers in between this relapse, the morally reprehensible decisions he makes, contribute to Cumberbatch’s complex interpretation of a man who was not wholly bad or wholly good.
You can look at his performance as emulating the stereotype of the overtly straight-laced academic type. But, by the end, if you believe this, your heart is stone. When we see him weary from the state-sanctioned hormone therapy he’s given, when everything he’s ever tried to suppress emerges in a tirade of emotion, you can’t help but remember the pain of that young boy (Alex Lawther) who lost his childhood love so randomly and so tragically. Don’t mistake it for melodrama – it’s a moment the movie builds up towards quite well.
But Cumberbatch’s performance is an intellectual triumph as well. Turing builds the Enigma decoding device as a way to defeat the Nazi’s. We’re introduced to Turing as this person far more interested in “problem solving” than in the heroic noblesse of fighting evil, a logician rather than a politician. But throughout the film, Turing goes from code-breaker to a war-strategist; he makes the crucial decision to conceal life-saving information killing one of the employee’s brothers in the process. Turing’s intense focus and commitment to his craft is as deeply felt as his longing for connection.
When he shuts the light on Christopher, he’s losing not only his life’s work but the last illusory attachment to his repressed self, to a happiness uncorrupted by society’s cruel grasp. The script does an excellent job of communicating his passions and struggles without resorting to melodrama or obvious indicators.
Before your heads explode from my praising of this film, let’s step aside for a minute to discuss what the film doesn’t do quite so well. Like most critics, I can be quite forgiving of a movie’s flaws when I really like it. Unfortunately, it falls a little bit stale in its more forced moments. Granted, they don’t have a lot of time to tell this story. But – for instance – can we believe that Alan Turing worked excruciating long months on the Enigma code-breaking machine without ever thinking to narrow the search to commonly used phrases? That he all of a sudden miraculously had a revelation in a bar? These are comically bad moments, but exist as a result of the constrained framework in which they’re working in (many times, I wondered if the miniseries format might have worked better to tell this story).
And for a film so dedicated to illuminating the main character’s psychology, the relationships felt underdeveloped, especially between him and Joan Clarke. While pleasant and bubbly, Keira Knightley does not look like she’s thinking like mathematician most of the time, regardless how many she furrows her brow. Which is a problem if the film is trying to convince you this woman is a genius at the level of Turing. Where Cumberbatch registered weariness and burden over the weight of his genius, Knightley plays Clarke with a levity which keeps the movie from achieving greater heights. She’s not at the level of Cumberbatch and the writing for is a bit cursory, especially for a film that has taken dramatic liberties and filled in gaps to begin with.
Joan Clarke is meant to be the emotional center of the film but it’s all too puffy for a story that is so tragic and complex. Where the film does wonders exploring Turing’s past and motivations, Clarke is always the corollary and never a fully realized character in her own right. But is this sexism if this is true of all the characters? Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear and Allen Leach – as Turing’s merry band of code-breaker assistants – are given thin material as well and their characters felt too peripheral to Turing. You get the feeling something more was to be felt between them and yet it never feels so. “This better bloody work,” is a line of sitcom-dialogue, sending me into a fit of giggles . And for a movie capable of extraordinary heights, it reached downward as well.
But it lands. Remarkably, in fact. We close in on Turing looking at the burning files, celebrating and rejoicing. The detective story results in what is really a death-sentence for Turing; he’s mandated to inject himself with hormones by the UK government. But instead of ending on a suicidal note, we end on Turing as he once was, in that brief moment: a flawed hero. For all the qualms one might have about poorly made choices (easily correctable, might I add), Tyldum’s beautiful cinematic composition, Graham Moore’s well-balanced script and Cumberbatch’s overwhelmingly brilliant performance make this a monument worthy of the man who was Alan Turing.
Grade: B+
Check out David's review here.