The Imitation Game

I had a discussion with my housemates the other night about what constitutes a biopic. Is it just the dramatising of a personal history, or does that person need a certain level of fame and historical proximity (or distance)? Is, for instance, The Social Network a biopic? Lawrence of Arabia? Andrei Rublev? All these films have deeply individualised narratives, and yet each reaches well beyond this remit to offer critiques of art, war, and modern technology.

These questions and definitions matter because The Imitation Game both is and is not about Alan Turing. It also seems unsure of just how much it wants to be about Alan Turing. I sense it would prefer to be about the Second World War, which offers a safe vantage point from which it can explore Turing's breaking of the Nazi Enigma Code. In fact, there is a moment where one of the coders frets about the comfort of their position compared to the soldiers risking their lives on the ground. Oddly, this film finds similar refuge in Bletchley Park, the setting it uses as a hiding place from its own subject.

Turing, played here with wonderfully emotive discomfort by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a man at once applauded and erased by history. He was a war hero who helped to shorten the conflict by approximately two years, and a criminal, chemically castrated on the orders of the British Justice system after his homosexuality was discovered. Morten Tyldum's film struggles to come to terms with the full ugliness of the latter. In a brief, galling postscript, viewers are reminded that Turing was granted a royal pardon in 2013: just one victim amongst 49,000 to receive an apology abhorrent in its inadequacy.

The man's hidden life is largely documented through flashbacks to his time at school, where he fell in love with a classmate, Christopher, whose name is immortalised in Turing's universal code-breaking machine. Aside from these brief childhood moments, Turing is emotionally constrained and socially impossible, grating on his colleagues with regular displays of apathy, arrogance, and contempt for their abilities. As the louche Hugh Alexander, Matthew Goode is a striking antidote to Cumberbatch's pained discomposure, whilst Keira Knightley is surprisingly restrained as Turing's sole companion, Joan Clarke. In a glib attempt at thematic unity, the film spells out the correlations between mathematic and social codes, as a young Turing admits that he does not understand why people never say what they mean. As an adult, he is puzzled by human interaction, finding solace in the cold logic of the machine.

The various strands of this history are too complex to be neatly tied together, which is unfortunately what this film attempts to do as it progresses. Particularly jarring is the repetition of its tagline: 'sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine.' Horribly twee, it bizarrely ignores that fact that a prodigious Cambridge mathematics fellow is precisely the sort of person of whom you might expect brilliance. This line's tone reflects the dialogue as a whole: clunky, mawkish, and poorly considered. It's a shame because the acting is generally excellent, and there are glimpses of a better film amongst the softly-lit flashbacks and predictable set-pieces. The real problem is its half-hearted probing of the issues it raises. Where it can be saccharine and sentimental it lingers; where it uncovers real horror, it retreats.