The Imitation Game Review

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” That’s the central thesis of The Imitation Game, repeated three times throughout the film to emphasize the sentimental feeling you get whenever Benedict Cumberbatch‘s World War Two code breaker Alan Turing stumbles and falls along the way to success. It’s also central to the way in which films like this want you to see acts of genius or heroism as exceptional. Put simply, The Imitation Game wants to make loners out of geniuses.

Somewhere that felt like halfway through The Imitation Game, Alan Turing plays a game with a detective. In the game, one person asks another a series of questions in order to figure out if they’re speaking to a human being or a machine. The game provides the film with a simple philosophical conceit that addresses some of its complex themes. It asks us to figure out if people are people by observing them through the unique lens of a single person. Can we judge one man as easily as we do hundreds or thousands? It’s in our nature to struggle with questions like this, and so the game part of Turing’s interaction with the detective becomes evident. Humans want to see one another as meaningless numbers but we perceive too easily the humanity made present in sadness, loneliness, love, success, and even in violence. Or at least we do when Benedict Cumberbatch is doing the best he can.

Films like The Imitation Game always play these kinds of games with our hearts and minds. They focus on scenes that speak to everything that made their subjects unique, special and different from everyone else around them. By many accounts, The Imitation Game even dials up some of Alan Turing’s eccentricities, cutting an isolated loner out of the life of a man who was allegedly quite well regarded by his colleagues and had many friends. But an argument around the authenticity of the portrayal of a real world figure in a film, particularly a genius, has about as much purpose to a film as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s complaints about physics in storytelling. You could argue that Cumberbatch’s take on Turing doesn’t need to be so absurdly analytic or trot so sternly along the spectrum for Asperger’s Syndrome to emphasize his genius. In this particular case, you might even be right.

With his insistent construction of a code-breaking “Turing Machine” during World War Two, the real Alan Turing essentially opened the doorway for modern computing as we know it. Not to mention that his efforts in the 1940s, along with those of his colleagues, helped end the war and save millions of lives. It’s just that those facts on their own don’t necessarily make for a strong character arc, nor do they provide the sort of pathos an audience needs to engage with a genius, whom society tells us is an exceptional sort of person that none of us can hope to approach in our attempts at self expression.

So instead we get a few standards: a strange young man with an exceptional talent that is difficult to communicate to others finds himself brushing up against his more sociable peers and their cockiness in the face of repeated failure. It’s a little like a 1980s teen comedy where Benedict Cumberbatch is a charming nerd going up against the jocks at school. Only here the jocks are nerds themselves, shepherded by sexier and more confident code breaker Hugh Alexander (played by the sexy, confident Matthew Goode). It’s also why so much of the story seems to focus on Turing’s relationship and brief engagement to Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). It feels like we’re meant to empathize as strongly as possible with Turing, who is constantly struggling to communicate himself to the world around him, but the film itself struggles to communicate this to us. It’s partly constructed as a slowly unraveling mystery, and partly as a stereotypical biopic about a genius, and just for good measure there’s a bit of a World War Two thriller mixed in as well. It makes it a little difficult to find something meaningful to hold onto through the entire film, rather than just constantly attaching yourself to what the filmmakers hope you’ll follow when they throw it at you.

If there is a message at the heart of The Imitation Game, it’s one about society’s relationship with people who we decide are ‘different’. In broad strokes the film establishes that Alan Turing was different because he was a genius, yes, but it also focuses on the fact that he was a gay man living in a time when being gay was considered a crime. He helped to save millions of lives and his work helped usher in a new scientific field and as a reward, society decided he should be chemically castrated, humiliated and abandoned to his sad fate.

Maybe it’s because of the complexity of this message that The Imitation Game is such an unbalanced film. It leans too hard on the schmaltz sometimes, and its construction feels unnecessarily complicated, but the individual performances speak to the humanity of what’s being portrayed here. Benedict Cumberbatch in particular attempts to elevate his underwritten character as best he can. I’d even argue that in all his grasping for a line or emotional beat, he more than manages it. If there’s a reason to see this film, it’s to see Cumberbatch take a traditional cinematic cliche – the loner genius – and attempt to invigorate it with something more like humanity. In small clashes that take place in a small world, he’s able to find the love, the success, the failure, the loneliness and sadness. He even makes the brief violence feel meaningful. He takes the puzzles pieces of a character and gives us an image worth looking at, making the film feel more than just well intentioned. But the question still nags me: are you watching a computer or a human being?

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Exceptional actor Benedict Cumberbatch successfully elevates a by-the-numbers drama about an exceptional man, making the film feel a little bit more exceptional than it is.