The Imitation Game (2014)

Score: 4 / 5

A surprisingly cold and calculated film, The Imitation Game indeed feels much like a game throughout: one of secrecy and facades, one of brilliance and progression, and ultimately one for which the penalty is death. Our story concerns the life of one Alan Turing, a British mathematician who helped break the Enigma Code, and who was thus key to Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II. Seemingly as a reward for this success, he was criminally prosecuted for his sexuality and chemically castrated before his (alleged) suicide in 1954.

Benedict Cumberbatch performs Turing with his tried-and-true ability to clearly paint a character whose mind works far quicker and abler than most of us could imagine. But he also -- and rather unexpectedly, I thought -- delivers a powerhouse emotional performance, smartly masked by his adherence to cultural and social conventions (namely, what we might affectionately note as a stereotypical British aversion to emoting). In the few moments when his character does let his feelings loose, Cumberbatch bravely owns the screen with vulnerability and honesty. His own performance, I should say, isn't so much an imitation game as an Enigma code in its own right, and one that deserves still more brilliant minds to solve. And his supporting cast is not much less impressive. Kiera Knightley parries his every move with flawless empathy and energy; Matthew Goode and Allen Leech play Turing's complex and conflicted co-code-breakers, while Mark Strong and Charles Dance add strength as intelligence commanders for an operation so secret that even once the code has been broken they cannot disclose their success.

Director Morten Tyldum and writer Graham Moore, however, have created an endlessly watchable maze of intelligence and subtlety, and one that is in itself a most dangerous game of wit and skill. As you might expect, the "code" motifs and rhetoric of the film have seemingly endless parallels and riffs in morality, sexuality, society, and so forth, making the film constantly fresh and engaging. I don't particularly like the excess of "footage" interspersed throughout the film; I think the newsflash images are meant to ground us in the world and give us context, but for a film this intimate, all they do is take me out of the moment.

Interestingly -- and very significantly, as far as I'm concerned -- there is no "sex scene", no lurid kiss. I'm not aware of many films with a gay protagonist that haven't sought to exploit (or punish) his carnality, so I was very pleased with that [I should clarify: Turing himself (and in terms of the plot here) is punished for his alleged proclivities, but this film's commentary on that punishment is explicitly negative]. This omission fits quite well with this particular film, moreover, because so much of Turing's character is its own secrecy. We do, however, see his youth in school, as he apparently developed love for a fellow classmate; this kind of sentimentality at first put me off, but later I realized that, rather than forcing any rote sexual encounter into the film, our filmmakers wanted to emphasize a psychological and emotional approach to Turing's character. Bravo.

One last note: Alexandre Desplat's score is a knockout. I might be biased because he's one of my favorites, but it's really amazing here.

IMDb: The Imitation Game