The Imitation Game - Oscar for Cumberbatch?

Went last week to see The Imitation Game.  The combination of maths and Second World War history is a sure winner for me, so there was no way I was going to miss out on this one.  The film is a biopic of Alan Turing, one of Britain's all-time great mathematicians, a man who was instrumental in the Allied war effort and who remains largely unknown to the general public.  He was the leader of a team who worked on breaking the Nazi Enigma code.  His team developed what was effectively the worlds first modern computer, a machine that could quickly hunt for solutions to the code and allow the Allies to read otherwise unintelligible messages.

I'm going to heap a lot of praise on to this film in a minute, so let's start with one slight negative.  Though the film mostly avoids cliché when describing the enigmatic (see what I did there) Turing, a bit of it creeps in towards the start when Turing goes for his interview at Bletchley Park.  He puts on a reclusive genius act, answering his interview questions in a deliberately oblique way before throwing in a killer line just as he is about to get thrown out of the building.  He then spends the entire film as an autistic prodigy, unable to understand social situations or work with others.  Now I have no idea if the real Alan Turing was like this, but it's hardly innovative to portray a mathematical prodigy as a semi-autistic recluse.

Aside from that though, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing and absolutely nails his performance.  If there's any sense left in the Academy then he should be in consideration for an Oscar next year.  He is supported by a host of British talent including Matthew Goode, Keira Knightly, Mark Strong, Charles Dance and many others.  Cumberbatch's Turing is insular, brilliant and occasionally funny, but he is ultimately a man consumed by his own hopes and desires in a world that wants to persecute him for it.  All he wants to do is to solve puzzles, and the Enigma code is the greatest puzzle of them all.  We follow the action at Bletchley Park as Turing's team of code-breakers struggle against a bureaucracy that doesn't understand their work.  When they finally break the code their world turns upside turn forever as they're covered in an even greater veil of secrecy, forced to make code-blooded decisions about what intelligence to make use of, for fear that the Nazis will realise they've cracked Enigma.

I read one review recently that castigated the film for its lack of historical accuracy, and furthermore claimed that the film was actually slandering Alan Turing by accusing him of covering up for Soviet spies.  I think what this reviewer failed to understand was that this is a film that is meant to be a mainstream biopic of Turing, not a history lesson in cryptography.  I think it is reasonable to accept simplifications to the story of how Enigma was broken in order to do this.  Turing endured state-sanctioned prejudice and criminal prosecution because of his sexuality; given how far society has come since the 1950s, that's something a mainstream audience might struggle to connect with.  The film uses the spying subplot as a way to convey just how secretic gay men had to be about their personal lives back in those days, showing that a Soviet spy could blackmail a good man into silence just by knowing he is gay.  Once you accept this, then what you're left with is brilliantly-paced film that tells an amazing story about a man who's achievements should make him a national hero.

Ultimately the film is a rallying cry to the people of Great Britain.  It's a call for us to remember this man, a man who's name was airbrushed out of official history for too long, a man who came up with the theories that underpin modern computing, a man who's insular and eccentric ideas were a decisive factor in the second world war, a man who was used and then chemically castrated by an establishment for whom he won a war.  Alan Turing's name and achievements should be as widely known to the people of this country as Winston Churchill's, and if this film goes any way towards making that happen then it will have achieved its goal.  Tears were welling up in my eyes as the final scenes played out and Cumberbatch brought to life the horrors that the British state wrought upon a man who changed the course of history and got no thanks for it.   I thought it was absolutely brilliant.