The screenplay by newcomer Graham Moore (who also co-produced) was taken from Andrew Hodges’s best-selling 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, although like Selma, The Theory of Everything, and American Sniper, three other recent biopic Oscar contenders, some definite liberties have been taken with the facts (most of the audience won’t be bothered to compare, and honestly none of the digressions from the historical record are anything out of the ordinary). Moore cleverly structures the screenplay around three major incidents in Turing’s life, skipping amongst them in a way that doesn’t always make strict chronological sense, but instead allows various themes that defined Turing’s character to deepen.

The main narrative thread involves Turing’s work with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park to crack Enigma, the seemingly unbreakable Nazi code that was rightly viewed as the key to winning the war. Turing immediately conflicts with everyone around him, including the British officer overseeing his work (Charles Dance) and his fellow mathematicians, whom he deems intellectually inferior. The only person with whom he seems to get along at all is Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), a young woman he recruits to join the code-breaking team even though her presence among a bunch of male intellectuals flouted social decorum and gender bias. While the others try to break the code using conventional means of decryption, Turing determines that the only way to defeat a machine is to build another machine, a costly electrical decrypter the size of small bus that could work much faster and more efficiently than even a roomful of the greatest human minds.

Intercut throughout that main narrative are two other narrative threads, one in Turing’s past and one in his future. The past story involves Turing’s relationship as a young adolescent (Alex Lawther) with a fellow boarding school student named Christopher (Jack Bannon), who is the only one who not only treats him well, but recognizes his interests and encourages them (whether or not Christopher had the same romantic “crush” on Alan that Alan clearly has on him is left vague). The tragic arc of this story at least partially explains Turing’s later interpersonal demeanor, suggesting that he was so damaged by the disappointment that he could no longer fully engage with others. The second narrative thread takes place in the early 1950s where a fictionalized police detective (Rory Kinnear) begins rooting around in Turning’s past after his house is broken into, which threatens to reveal his homosexuality. Moore uses Turing’s subsequent police interrogation to provide the film’s narrative framework, as Turing narrates his years at Bletchley directly to the detective, a rather absurd conceit given that his admission of secret wartime activities would have constituted a much graver crime than homosexual acts. Nevertheless, the point is to contextualize Turing’s great achievement during the war with bookends of social and political persecution to ensure his martrydom.

Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, who last helmed the brutally effective black comedy Headhunters (2011), is making his English-language debut, and he displays a sure hand in giving The Imitation Game a perfectly realized sense of polish and confidence (the cinematography is by Óscar Faura, who most recently shot the glossy survival tale The Impossible). If The Imitation Game feels like a relatively impersonal work, it is because Tyldum is clearly working in the Harvey Weinstein-mandated mainstream, which tends to sand off all the rough edges and deliver something that is both artful and meaningful, at least on the surface. The Imitation Game certainly works in terms of what it was designed to do, and it is not surprising that it has garnered so much awards attention; it can’t stop us from wishing, though, that Tyldum had been able to make a film that was more daring than conventional, more challenging than middle-of-the-road tragic.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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