The Imitation Game Review: A Superb Cumberbatch Plays It Safe

The Imitation Game review: a fascinating story, told by the book

There are films that are hard to review because they are bad and films that are hard to review because they are good in a way you have seen before. The Imitation Game is the second kind. It tells a fascinating story exceptionally well, and it also feels built for awards season, a World War II true story in the mold of the ones that arrive every autumn. The skill is real. The question the review keeps returning to is whether a skilled film can still be a conventional one.

The subject should have invited something less conventional. Alan Turing was the mathematician who led the effort to break the Enigma cipher used by Nazi Germany. He was also a founding figure of modern computing, and he was gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain and was punished harshly. A life with three such strands deserves a film that takes risks with its form. This one tells it in a straightforward, uninspired way, and that is a letdown given the material.

The film is based on Andrew Hodges' 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Graham Moore wrote the screenplay, Morten Tyldum directed, and the cast is led by Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing with Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke. The runtime is 115 minutes. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 2014, won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in the United Kingdom on November 14 and reached U.S. theaters in limited release on November 28, expanding on Christmas Day.

The Weinstein Company, which acquired U.S. rights in early 2014, distributed it, and the film's awards prospects were a talking point from its first festival screenings.

Three timelines, one familiar structure

The film tells Turing's story across three periods of his life. Most of it takes place during World War II, where Turing arrives as a genius mathematician offering to break the Enigma code. The second strand follows him as a schoolboy, played by Alex Lawther, who falls desperately in love with a classmate. The third jumps ahead to the early 1950s, when Turing is investigated by police for homosexual acts.

The cross-cutting looks intriguing at first and settles into a standard pattern of flashbacks and flash-forwards. The 1950s scenes are heartbreakingly sad and lead to an even sadder conclusion, but they add little until the very end, and their placement throughout the film gets tedious. A more inventive structure might have let the three periods comment on one another. Here they mostly take turns.

Turing at Bletchley Park

On screen, Turing is hard to work with. He knows his strengths, has little patience for anyone else and is not shy about saying so, and the film makes him as prickly as it can. He clashes with his superior, Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), with the cryptanalyst Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), with the intelligence officer Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) and with a team of younger codebreakers that includes Allen Leech, who played Tom Branson on Downton Abbey.

The comparison that comes to mind is T. E. Lawrence, another British figure who was gay, brilliant and difficult with authority. The difference is that Lawrence was playfully difficult, and this Turing is something sharper. He backs it up with results, which keeps the audience on his side.

The Imitation Game review: Joan Clarke and the rest of the cast

The most important recruit is Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley, a gifted young woman who tells her parents she is merely working as a secretary so that no one thinks she is living indecently among men. She becomes one of Turing's few confidants, and the two enter an unconventional engagement. Knightley has strong scenes, but the role resembles much of her earlier period work, and few other members of the cast are given enough dramatic material to rise to Cumberbatch's level.

Knightley was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the major awards, and Cumberbatch for Best Actor.

The craft: score, design and direction

The film's polish is easy to see. Alexandre Desplat's score is one of its best features, a restless, melancholy piece that keeps the codebreaking scenes moving, and the production design recreates the huts of Bletchley Park with a convincing sense of cramped urgency. Tyldum, a Norwegian director who had made the thriller Headhunters, keeps the cutting between the three periods tidy and the performances clear.

That tidiness is also the problem. Every scene arrives in the shape a viewer expects it to take: the doubting superior, the skeptical colleagues, the breakthrough in the middle of an ordinary conversation, the sudden swell of music. The film is handsome, accurate to the spirit of its subject in places, and almost never surprising.

How Turing's story ends, and what the film does with it

The film's final stretch deals with the aftermath of the 1952 investigation. In real life, Turing was convicted in Britain for homosexual acts and died in 1954. The Imitation Game treats this as the saddest part of its story, and the scenes between Cumberbatch and Rory Kinnear, who plays the detective Robert Nock, are among the best in the picture. They are also the scenes that the structure keeps interrupting.

For an audience that knows little about Turing, the ending lands hard. For an audience that knows the history, it is a reminder that the most important facts about the man were not invented by a screenwriter, and that a film this carefully made about them could have done more to let them breathe.

The Imitation Game at a glance

• Director: Morten Tyldum. Writer: Graham Moore, from Andrew Hodges' biography Alan Turing: The Enigma.
• Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Alan Turing), Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke), Matthew Goode (Hugh Alexander), Charles Dance (Commander Denniston), Mark Strong (Stewart Menzies), Allen Leech (John Cairncross), Rory Kinnear (Detective Robert Nock).
• Runtime: 115 minutes. Rating: PG-13.
• Premiere: Telluride Film Festival, August 29, 2014; U.S. limited release November 28, 2014.
• Academy Awards: eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and one win, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Imitation Game review verdict: the performance justifies the film

Everything depends on Cumberbatch, and he delivers. As a character who is disliked by almost everyone around him for most of the film, he puts the audience on Turing's side from the first scene and keeps them there, even when the prickliness would push a lesser actor's character away. By the end the instinct is to thank the man for how many lives he saved. It is the kind of performance that makes the film worth seeing, and it earned him a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards. The short version: see it for the lead and expect a safe film.

The rest of the picture is clean and capable. It looks good, has a lovely score and is put together competently, but it feels like something the audience has seen before. The brilliant lead and the compelling subject made it easy to want to love it, and the film's refusal to take any risks keeps that from happening.

The history is also loosely handled. The film depicts events that did not happen, including a Turing-Cairncross espionage subplot and an arrest for espionage, when Turing was actually investigated in 1952 for homosexual acts. It implies that Turing invented the computer on his own, and it leaves out the contribution of Gordon Welchman and the work on the Lorenz cipher. Anyone who wants the real story should read Hodges. Turing received a posthumous royal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II, announced on December 24, 2013, less than a year before the film's festival premiere.

At the 2015 Academy Awards, the film received eight nominations and won one, for Best Adapted Screenplay. That result suits it: a well-made film that was admired for its craft and its subject but that did not move the voters to give it the top prize.

The best way to describe The Imitation Game is as an honorable first attempt at a story that deserves more than one telling. For a viewer coming to Turing for the first time, it works. For a viewer who wanted the form to match the man, it is the safe version.

A last word on the Oscar angle. Eight nominations is a large haul, and the film's reception shows how well it served its purpose. As a piece of craft it deserved the attention. As a reading of Turing it left room for a bolder film, and that room is what keeps it from the top tier.

Seen a decade on, the film also shows how quickly an awards favorite can settle into a respectable middle: widely seen, widely praised and rarely rewatched for anything beyond its lead. Reviews that praise the cast and question the ambition are describing the same film.

Sources

• The Imitation Game, Wikipedia — cast and crew, release dates and awards