#WhatThomWatched Glance*:
The Imitation Game
(Morten Tyldum, 2014; In theaters/Disc release details not yet announced)
Recommended for: People interested in cryptography, and/or World War II, and/or British biopics — and/or Benedict Cumberbatch.)
Although there have been a couple high-profile movie treatments of seminal cryptographer and father of the modern computer Alan Turing (most notably Breaking the Code from 1996, with Derek Jacobi as Turing, and based on the same source material), The Imitation Game is really the first attempt to fully address both Turing’s contributions to World War II and his illicit life as a gay man in 1940’s England. Benedict Cumberbatch excels at portraying Turing’s social awkwardness and preternatural intelligence alike; there are also excellent roles for his real-life codebreaking team at Bletchley Park including Keira Knightley as a mathematician determined to operate outside the societal restraints imposed on women. It’s handsomely produced, intelligently written, and well-paced, but beyond being a simple prestige picture it also shows a very specific and shameful example of historical intolerance for homosexuality, in a clear and straightforward way.
Reminds me of:
Other well-made British-cast British-subject biopics — though I don’t usually get into “standard” biopics over the new-school versions from directors like Michael Winterbottom, who seem determined to upend conventions (cf. his depictions of Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, or Mariane and Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart). This one has a few of the trite, old melodrama beats and is not terribly faithful to the historical Turing. But I was still impressed at the larger statement it was able to make about Turing’s sexual preference and the way his work could stand in more than one metaphorical way for his personhood and his struggles. I’m pleased to read about scholarship which indicates that his actual life may not have been nearly as abject as what we see here, but at the same time Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore have made creative choices which allow Turing to represent much more than just himself; after all, as we learn from a post-film credit, 49,000 other people in Britain were also convicted of gross indecency. The Turing Test is a powerful metaphor for the coded lives these men and women had to lead.
As it happens, in my ongoing (and slow) quest to read everything by Neal Stephenson, I’d recently finished his excellent Cryptonomicon from 1999. This semi-historical novel includes several real Bletchley Park (and rival) codebreakers, among them a far cheerier rendition of Turing. Stephenson also goes light years beyond the complications presented in this film; the final stage of Imitation Game, where the disinformation campaigns begin to kick into gear, is the starting point of the book which (in addition to loads more guns, sex, and haiku) has a much higher level of complexity. For anyone primarily interested in the cryptography problems of advanced warfare, I recommend Stephenson.
But then — the guilt!
As effective as it may be, the movie's still not the accurate story of what happened or what Turing or the Bletchley Park crew did. Showing “science” (or any higher-order creativity) on-screen in ways that audiences respond to is really hard. But as viewers, we should continue to push filmmakers and other artists to do the work and turn these concepts into forms that we can experience and understand. The movie that somehow manages to embody the actual innovative leaps of a Turing (or an Einstein, or a Van Gogh, or a Mozart) and make an audience feel them will be a marvel. (I put this in the BTTG section because I can't readily think of a successful example. Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is the best parallel I can come up with; in that case a book somehow fully embodies and passes on to the reader the experience of painting, in three incredible pages. I haven’t seen Ed Harris’s Pollock — maybe that captures a similar creative moment in cinematic form? Well, if a movie example comes to me, I won't cheat and edit out my admissions here — I'll post it below in the comments. Feel free to contribute your own!)
Pitch:
Knightley and Cumberbatch's scene together where she denounces his clumsy attempts to push her away is an impressive one — she’s doing a lot of emotional work with a small set of lines.
*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.
