What it is about
Bletchley that drives the British crazy? Another Oscar nominee 'based
on a true story', The Imitation Game provides yet another rejoinder
to the British obsession with criticising Hollywood's playing with
historical fact while ignoring British films which are every bit as
'economical with the 'actualite'. As I
watched The Imitation Game, waiting for Kate Winslett to cycle
through one of the shots, I recalled that in Enigma the traitor turned out to be a
Pole. Except no Poles were allowed to work at Bletchley, even though the Poles had
provided the Brits with an Enigma machine; they were banned because
Johnny Foreigner can't be trusted to keep secrets like good old
chappies from the right schools and Oxbridge.
The Imitation Game
is structured as a thrilller: can Alan Turing and the Famous Five
solve Hitler's puzzle in time to win the war? In order to make this
thrilling, some truths need to be bent. Turing's inspiration, of
looking for the words, like 'Heil Hitler' that appeared in every
message was something that had been part of the decoding process
since almost the beginning. And of course it wasn't simply a handful
of people in one quonset hut watching while Turing built his
computer; there were thousands of people engaged in the process at Bletchley Park.
But as the title
implies, The Imitation Game isn't really a thriller. It's about
Turing himself, as the ultimate enigma, and his own Imitation Game, his hidden life which saw
him arrested for indecency in the early Fifties, and given drugs to
chemically castrate him. Which is a story worth telling, and which
has been told in a number of biographies. But the film
traps itself in a morbid fascination with the appeal of victimhood,
which forces it to twist Turing and his work to fit its framework of
injustice.
There need to be
obstacles in Turing's way, besides the obvious mechanical and
mathematical ones. Hitler isn't villain enough for this film.
The
real villain has to be Alastair Denniston, transformed from a
cryptographer himself who apparently ran his unit well, into a Colonel
Blimp figure ignorant of the work his staff was doing and more
obsessed with bringing down Turing than Hitler. Which is a shame,
because the opening sparring between Charles Dance as Denniston and
Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing is great, and could have been the
basis of some dramatic tension without creating a cardboard villain.
The
real villain has to be Alastair Denniston, transformed from a
cryptographer himself who apparently ran his unit well, into a Colonel
Blimp figure ignorant of the work his staff was doing and more
obsessed with bringing down Turing than Hitler. Which is a shame,
because the opening sparring between Charles Dance as Denniston and
Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing is great, and could have been the
basis of some dramatic tension without creating a cardboard villain.
In this film Turing
has the double curse of being both gay and geek. Although Cumberbatch
has a few Sherlock Holmes moments early in the movie, he has to be
portrayed as being completely asocial (despite a dress sense which
only disappears after he's drugged); the real Turing apparently could
be quite gregarious. Although the film is sympathetic to Turing, it
revels in stereotyping him: twice in the film Turing in effect
commits treason: after the war by telling his whole story to the
Javert-like detective who's convinced he's a spy, and during the war
by hiding the fact that John Cairncross is a Soviet spy. Of course
Cairncross, the infamous Fifth Man, never worked with Turing, ergo,
Turing never was blackmailed by him, ergo Hollywood must have slipped this into the script when no noble Englishman was looking.
The conceit of the
film, in turning Turing's paper titled The Imitation Game into a
metaphor for his self, is a good one. He 'thinks differently', and a
parallel is drawn between the man and his thinking machine. But in
his naming the machine Christopher, after his lost early love, and
his breakdown at the thought of losing what by movie's end is his
only friend, takes him completely overboard. What's touching is the
way Turing learns early to cover up his emotions, when the headmaster
tell him his friend is dead, and he realises he never knew
Christopher was even ill. Yet it's just as much English public school stiff upper lip as English closeted homosexuality. But just maybe the two are connected. But as young Turing says to Christopher, all speech is
really in code, and in that is the core of what this film ought to
have been about.
Turing was
victimised, of course, but he also lived an active life (we never see
a moment of gay affection in the entire movie; in fact its
iconography is more concerned with the love story between Turing and
Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightly who looks as out of place in
the 1940s as she does doing higher mathematics, although she does jut
her jaw on cue). It was Turing who reported the burglary of his
house to the police, not imagining it would lead to his own
prosecution. And though the film says Turing committed suicide after
finishing his court-ordered drug treatment, he in fact died a year
afterwards, and there is some debate about whether his death were
accidental rather than suicide.
It is right that
Turing should be elevated to the position of a national hero, and
that the prosecution and persecution of homosexuality should be condemned. The movie
is strongest precisely at the moments Turing seems most human: when
he realises immediately upon breaking the code that it cannot be used
immediately to save lives. That one of the team has a
sailor brother whose life is endangered that day is the kind of
clunky fictional liberty one allows in a film, but it's a lazy way to add to dramatic tension.
Still, there are liberties and there are liberties, as a 1940s bishop
might have said to an actress, or indeed an actor. Bend the reality
of Bletchley to make the chase of code-breaking more exciting, that's
the way the game is played. But bend it to insist on Turing as a
helpless victim, and reduce him to tears (it reminded me of
Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; he's left
crying there too, as Guillam is given a gay backstory that seems to
exist only for that teary payoff) and that's unfair,
and indeed unheroic. The Imitation Game is structured and written (by Graham Moore, based on Andrew Hodges' book) cleverly, and
directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum with the same visual panache and sense of movement that made Headhunters so enjoyable. Within its own terms works well; it's just a shame its terms are so
limited by its agenda.
