The Imitation Game (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                   1 hr & 54 min, color, 2014

“Sometimes it’s the very people who no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”  Three times we hear those words on the soundtrack of this extraordinary motion picture, and each and every time they are spoken in reference to the same individual, i.e. Alan Turing, a mathematical scientist who made a secret and amazing contribution to the winning of the Second World War by his native England.  His story is decades late being told, because his work was so surreptitious and so unprecedented at the time that disclosure after the fact might very well have endangered the lives of his inner circle of fellow mathematicians and indicted the careers of certain high ranking military personnel.  It was a story of personal, behind-the-scenes, sneaky triumph that nobody at the time would believe anyhow.  All his personal top secret files were expunged at the end of the war, and only a few knew what he had been up to.  It took in fact five decades for the drama of his short life to be made public. 

Bernard Cumberbatch (Oscar nominee) gives a commanding, apparently flawless performance portraying him.  Turing was a child prodigy in the math department and by 1939, at the age of 26, he was audacious enough, academically astute enough and lettered enough to persuade the powers that be, which included no less than Winston Churchill, to put him in charge of a team trying to break a Nazi communications code, by all appearances unbreakable, that went by the then secret German name of Enigma. 

A very lonely, socially awkward and standoffish man who lived in his head, Turing was evidently brash and flippant in conversation enough when he had to be to forge his way into the dense structure of officialdom to make his case.  But doing so and getting himself put in charge of the project was just the first phase of his fight that went on for most of the length of the war, not only with the upper brass but with his impatient team members.  It seemed apparent to them that there was only a million to one chance of cracking this Enigma code and could not fathom why Turing spent all his time constructing a machine which he named Christopher.  No one could have imagined that that machine would become the precursor of what we today call a computer.  The way he posed the query was: “What if a machine could decode a machine?”  The Enigma machine to be decoded by his Christopher!  Unlike the human brain that can only examine one coded message at a time, the machine could examine millions in a matter of minutes.

A man named Graham Moore won this past season’s Oscar for the film’s screenplay, which is adapted from the book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma.”  A well deserved honor!  Despite the complicated ramifications of the experiment that tests even the scientifically smartest in the audience, the dialogue is forceful and precise enough to capture the sustained attention of even those of the most meager scientific comprehension such as myself.  (I think I said enough on that subject at the beginning of my previous movie write-up in the April 5 posting on this blog.  If you have not read my comments on “The Theory of Everything,” another true story of a scientist, you can do so at your leisure.)  What makes the writing so dynamic and engrossing is the suspense.  We know Turing and his assistants are going to succeed, but how and when and after how many upsets, setbacks and collisions with their bosses and each other?  An amazing flow of events that if we did not know they are fact would serve as the basis for a rousing and controversial sci-fi tale!

I have no way, short of plowing through the book, which I have not done, of knowing who the fictional characters are as portrayed by a sharp British cast.  Keira Knightley is a young woman crossword genius who Turing reluctantly takes onto his team, when she outshines all the competitors for the top secret mission and gradually wins Turing’s respect.  When she reports for the crossword test, she is mistaken for one of those females applying for the secretarial pool.  She comes to play a very decisive role in the unfolding of the plot, as does a guy named Hugh (Matthew W. Goode), who turns out to be a bit of a rogue, at one point threatening the project but eventually saving it from collapse, when the bigwigs are about to scrap it. 

In fairness to the doubters, Turing’s idea would have seemed to almost anyone at the time to be the stuff out of which pipe dreams are made. 

It is after the war, in the 1950s, that tragedy descends upon Turing’s life, when it is discovered that he is a homosexual.  Homosexuality was at the time not only frowned upon in Great Britain but a crime punishable by imprisonment.  When brought before the judge (a scene we never witness), he is given only one alternative to that imprisonment – hormonal alteration through drugs, better known as chemical castration.  Screenplay writer Moore thankfully does not spend overbearing time on this episode.  He breaks things up nicely, jumping back and forth between the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1920s when Turing was a student in a boys academy, an editing device that it may take a while into the footage to get accustomed to.  We see Turing’s life as a fateful thread that binds all elements together in such a way that the final announcement of his suicide in 1954 at the age of 41 is not as jarring or unexpected as it might have been.  The last we see of this unfortunate man is really heartbreaking!  He is weeping all by himself, expressing fear of abandonment in front of Christopher, which has become his only companion.  This is probably Cumberbatch’s greatest moment, rounding out his brilliant portrayal.

In final credits we are told that Queen Elizabeth, all those fifty years later after his suppressed record was finally no longer top secret, granted him a posthumous Royal pardon.  I am certainly gratified by that move on her part, though I do not believe the word “pardon” was the right one.  One can only be pardoned for something done wrong.  When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he was not telling the country that Nixon was innocent.  He was saving him from the prosecution he deserved.  But in my book Turing did nothing to be prosecuted for, either during the war or in his sexual behavior.  What the Queen should have granted him was a Royal exoneration. 

We today are still playing the Imitation Game, which is the scheme to teach computers to emulate the human brain in its reasoning acuity.  And the question raised as far back as Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey” remains to be fully answered: How much capability will we permit them?  Will they always be at the service of human intelligence or will they somehow surpass us and develop minds of their own that produce ideas in opposition to and competition with ours?   I personally reason that as long as human intelligences of Turing’s caliber are in play, the chance of automatic intelligence gaining the ascendency will remain in grave doubt.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.