THE IMITATION GAME (M)
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Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Matthew Goode, Keira Knightley, Charles Dance
Director: Morten Tyldum
Screening: general release
Rating: ★★★
BENEDICT Cumberbatch is to aloof geniuses as John Wayne was to stoic cowboys: numero uno. Having already given us television's Sherlock (Holmes) and Australian hacker-turned activist Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, Cumberbatch now stars in The Imitation Game as Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who played a key role in winning World War II and inventing the computer, yet lived in anonymity before committing suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.
Morten Tyldum's handsome film is a series of interlocking mysteries. The first is whether Turing can solve "the most difficult problem in the world": breaking the daily code generated by Nazi Germany's Enigma machine (put 18 zeroes after 159 and you have the amount of possible solutions). Others include whether he can decipher the odd creatures - that is, people - he keeps encountering, and navigate his homosexuality.
Scenes set in 1951, where a burglary at his Manchester apartment brings a curious police detective (Rory Kinnear) into his life, show how Turing's sexuality leads to a conviction, which leads to his death. Turing barely acknowledges being gay, and neither does the film. It would have made a fascinating element, if only because Cumberbatch is so convincing as a brilliant, obsessive loner it would have been fascinating to watch him add desire and physical intimacy to his portrayal.
That said, the movie makes the cloistered world of Bletchley Park, the country estate where Britain's cryptanalysts worked during WWII, a place of gripping drama. Turing clashes with the facility's no-nonsense naval commander Denniston (Charles Dance) and his suave team leader Hugh (Matthew Goode), and his only supporter in building a machine to crack Enigma is fellow outsider Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a brilliant woman who must pose as a secretary. There are wry exchanges in Turing's social mystification, but you may also be reminded of Jim Parsons' Sheldon from television's The Big Bang Theory.
The Imitation Game walks a fine line in making the familiar effective, also reflecting A Beautiful Mind at points. Tyldum reaches for the stirring, aided immeasurably by Cumberbatch's exacting performance. But he notably doesn't rest on triumph: cracking the code simply means allowing enough allied soldiers to die so that the enemy doesn't suspect anything. That's the tragedy that illuminates the film: no solution is ever perfectly complete.
