Last Friday I saw The Imitation Game, the recent movie about British mathematician Alan Turing and the breaking of the German Enigma codes during World War II. It has been out for a while, but it was released only recently in my part of the world. It was panned a bit in The New Yorker, but with Keira Knightley in the cast, I wasn’t worried about wasting my time and money. Footage of her reading the phone book would be worth my price of admission. As it turned out, Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Turing also more than justified my investment.
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker film critic, was happy with Cumberbatch’s performance but was generally critical of the screenplay and how it portrayed historical events, mostly complaining about items left out or oversimplified. I agree with some of his points, mostly in regard to the computer-generated battle scenes which were a little more contrived than they needed to be, but otherwise I’m more willing to accept cinematic license on historical subjects so long as it doesn’t blatantly mislead viewers about what generally took place. In this case, we see how a social misfit performed service to his country and the world that was almost incalculable in its significance, and yet even those accomplishments were not enough to save him after the war when he fell victim to his nation’s indecency laws, which, despite their punitive nature, were similar to those in America and most other nations of the period. The tragedy of it, at least from my perspective, was that someone like Turing, including his homosexual orientation, would inspire hardly a ripple of controversy today. One could see him fitting into places like Google or Cal Tech without a second thought, and if he were still living, I would fully have expected The Big Bang Theory to have brought him on-screen for a cameo with the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking—one of that show’s most admirable practices. If there is a lesson to be taken from The Imitation Game, it’s that it’s not always good to be ahead of your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM
