“The Imitation Game”
Behind every code is an Enigma.
The movies love to remind us that brilliant minds are often the most tortured. Far be it from Morten Tyldum to suggest any difference in “The Imitation Game,” a World War II procedural detailing the efforts of cryptanalyst Alan Turing and his mathematically-inclined underlings to decrypt the Nazis’ famed Enigma machine and turn the tides in England’s favor. There’s more than one way to become a wartime casualty, however, and their secret office is its own sort of front line.
As played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Turing is a genius in the “The Social Network” and “A Beautiful Mind” mold: brilliant but utterly lacking interpersonal skills. He’s frequently lost in thought at the expense of those trying to reach him on even the most basic level it’s to the movie’s credit that there’s no hokey attempt at visualizing his brilliance via superimposed swirls and flashes of light, as is often done in films of this sort. Through flashbacks that also show his first love, the film links Turing’s preternatural cryptographic abilities to his inability to fully grasp the verbal communication. As these pieces fall into place, Turing becomes ever more sympathetic while still feeling beyond anyone’s grasp to help or even understand.
As Turing’s colleague/eventual wife Joan Clarke, Keira Knightley does exceptional work in a role that could have easily been expanded — much of her screen time is spent humanizing Turing by showing his capacity for non-romantic love and affection despite her IQ coming closer to his than anyone else’s. Her brilliance isn’t her defining characteristic, as Turing’s is, but Knightley joins her co-star in maximizing a familiar, even underwritten role.
Turning describes the aftereffects of eventually cracking the Nazis’ code as “Blood-soaked calculus.” A decision-making process that weighs the number of potential Allied lives saved against the possibility of Germany realizing their Enigma machine has been decrypted and immediately reprogramming it, thus undoing years of painstaking work. Even then, “The Imitation Game” never quite trumps the sense that Turing’s life was a messier, more complex enterprise than we’re allowed to see here. But the movie is undeniably strong in its sense of a bright light burned out too soon, and the often undignified fate of those who dare to chafe at society’s established norms.
But dominating it all is Cumberbatch, whose charisma tellingly modulated and a naturalistic array of eccentricities, Sherlockian talent at indicating a mind never at rest, and a knack for simultaneously portraying physical oddness and attractiveness combine to create an entirely credible portrait of genius at work makes me watch him on screen more and more.
A task given by @studymonk.inc #movienight #moviecontest