The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game doesn’t so much scratch as barely graze the surface of a very interesting and historically important individual. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, and it’s not. But it very noticeably lacks the weight, detail, and depth of character that such a subject probably warrants.

The subject is the British scientist and mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose theories and experiments arguably laid the foundation of modern computer science. The movie focuses mostly on his work at England’s Bletchley Park during World War II, where he and others worked tirelessly to break the Nazis’ Enigma Code.

But, you wouldn’t know from the picture that they worked much at all, or even that there was a war going on. Most of the wartime content seems to be played for laughs, as the scholarly minds bicker and banter away while hitting dead end after dead end. Whenever a plot point or twist seems like it’s about to shift the tone, it turns out to be just a set-up for another laugh. It feels like a lazy school chum comedy, with the admiral in charge of things (Charles Dance) coming off less like a military man than the archetypical stuck-up dean. Even with newsreels and combat footage cutting in to remind us they’re still at war, there’s no sense of urgency or tension, and we don’t even get a cursory explanation of how they cracked Enigma. Instead, it happens in a standard Hollywood “eureka” moment.

As Turing, Cumberbatch embodies pop culture’s simplistic view of Asperger’s, which is to say the shy, lovably tactless nerd (basically, like Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory). Given the direction the picture chose, this is actually just fine, as he plays off his costars well and derives humor from many moments. Still, it’s a bit of a one-note performance, though this might be more the picture's fault than his.

The best moments are the chronological bookends to the World War II stuff, showing a young Turing (Alex Lather) as a troubled student, and his postwar prosecution for his homosexuality. In the former, we get at least some understanding of the pain Turing carries later, and the latter sees Cumberbatch finally drop his comedic shell and show some tortured emotional range. These two plots surprisingly tie into the wartime majority of the picture quite well, in spite of the stark difference in tone. Even though the film seems intent on making us laugh for much of its runtime, it finishes as an affecting, fairly tragic call for tolerance in Turing’s memory.

It works, and is ultimately a respectful tribute to the man. But even though it doesn’t really follow the life event bullet points structure of so many biopics, it has the same relatively low level of thoroughness. A deeper character study of Turing or a detailed, puzzling picture on breaking Enigma could have been so interesting. It’s just a little disappointing that the story was instead a springboard for a light comedic film instead.