The Imitation Game is the fanciest ABC Afterschool Special ever made: It takes the inspiring, mystifying, and upsetting life story of a great genius and turns it into a didactic and banal lesson about how people who are “different” are also very, very special.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the visionary British mathematician who helped conceptualize the computer and was a key figure in the triumphant effort at Bletchley Park to break the Nazi code during World War II. Turing came to a terrible end after a minor robbery led to his conviction on grounds of “gross indecency”—for engaging in homosexual acts—and a judge gave him a Hobson’s choice between jail and a program of chemical castration. He chose the latter; two years later he committed suicide. He was 41 years old.
Screenwriter Graham Moore and director Morten Tyldum work hard, with some success, to integrate abstruse practices like code-breaking and computer design into the plot, though they do not approach the cleverness with which the similar (and, these days, unfairly maligned) A Beautiful Mind succeeded in portraying game theory. They are less successful, and even somewhat injurious, in their depiction of the agonizing moral dilemmas posed by the fact that the British broke the code and then had to stand by as Allied ships were sunk and planes shot down in order to keep the Germans from figuring it out.
The movie makes it seem as though Turing and his team were decision-makers when it came to these matters, and that they kept their discovery not only from the Germans but also from Winston Churchill and the Allied leadership at the behest of an ominous MI6 man. This is utter nonsense on stilts, and seems designed only to make an anachronistic Snowdenish point about the evils of intelligence gathering and the corrupting effects of secrecy. Aside from being indefensible when it comes to the proper treatment of historical fact within historical fiction, this weird plot gloss adds an unnecessary element of melodrama to a story that has no need of it.
Cumberbatch is an old hand by now at playing impossibly brilliant impossible men; he achieved stardom with his glorious turn on the BBC as a present-day Sherlock Holmes. It is a mark of what a terrific actor he is that there is absolutely nothing of Sherlock in his Turing, who is both imposingly formidable in his intellectual self-assurance and set sadly apart from others by the obsessive literalism that we instantly recognize as Asperger’s syndrome but his contemporaries viewed only as appalling arrogance and intolerable rudeness.
The Imitation Game is set during three different periods in Turing’s life. It begins after his arrest in 1952, and thereafter cuts between that time, the war years, and his lonely teenage existence at a boarding school. In each of these periods, Turing is glum, driven, difficult. The movie makes a great deal out of Turing’s social ineptitude and how it alienated everyone he ever knew but a schoolmate named Christopher. The Imitation Game is so committed to its portrait of Turing’s isolated loneliness and discomfort with human contact that it only mentions in passing, but does not show, how he had engaged in affairs with men.
What is more, the remarkable 1983 biography the film cites as its inspiration, Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma, makes it clear that while the “nimble, insouciant” Turing may have been deeply eccentric, he was nonetheless possessed of a mordant sense of humor. Hodges even compares the tone of Turing’s correspondence to that of P. G. Wodehouse. Cumberbatch’s Turing would not be able to understand a sentence of Wodehouse.
Nor would he have been capable of bestirring himself, as the real Turing did, to sponsor a German-Jewish refugee’s education in England on the eve of the war. In truth, Turing seems to have been a “character” in the classic British sense, a man who thought nothing of bicycling in the summer wearing a gas mask to stem the effects of pollen.
The Imitation Game reduces Alan Turing to a man living in social torment because of a condition his contemporaries did not understand—Asperger’s—and a sexual preference that made him a criminal in the eyes of the very country he had helped save from the Nazis. He greets the chemical castration to which he is forced to subject himself with a depressed and crippled resignation.
This, too, diverges from the portrait of Turing offered by his biographer, whose work does not suggest Turing suffered from Asperger’s and who specifically says Turing’s defiant and angry reaction to the injustice done to him was “different from the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure expected by fiction or drama.” It is astounding, then, that the movie arising from Hodges’s biography should have chosen to turn Alan Turing into exactly the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure he was not. Turing was not only the possessor of a great mind; he was a far more interesting person than the pathetic figure to which he has been reduced by a film that supposedly seeks to do him justice.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
