Photo by Daniel Cheon
Written by Alexander Cheves
“The Imitation Game,” screened last Thursday at the Trustees Theater, tells the story of Alan Turing, the man who cracked the German communications code “Enigma” during World War II. His efforts effectively won the war.
Depicted onscreen by Benedict Cumberbatch, Turing was a closeted gay man in England in the 1940s and ’50s, when homosexuality was illegal there. After the war, in 1952, Turing was discovered and prosecuted for “homosexual perversion.” He was given a choice between prison and a regimen of estrogen injections, a form of chemical castration. He chose the latter.
Turing committed suicide in 1954 with cyanide, which is alluded to in the first scene. Following reports of a break-in, two police officers investigate Turing’s home and find him in his kitchen, kneeling over a pile of spilt dust. “Don’t step any closer, and don’t breathe,” Turing says to them. He scoops the cyanide into a plate.
With Cumberbatch’s dangerous and melodic voice snaking itself through a witty and razor-sharp script, the whole film feels vaguely like a play in which everyone is trying to outsmart each other. All the actors seem very scripted, including Cumberbatch himself, and the hokey repetition of sentimental aphorisms at meaningful points in the story doesn’t help. Whenever the violins swell, someone reliably says, “It is usually the ones who no one imagines anything of that end up doing the things no one can imagine.” How sweet.
With beautiful, stage-like sets, “Imitation” creates Turing’s England as a lush place with a rich color palate, but the reality of it was probably much grayer: bomb-racked buildings, people emerging from smoke (not quite so cinematically as they do in the film), suffering through limited food and water. When Turing went to work at Britain’s secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, the outlook was bleak. The war was being lost, and the threat of Naziism was very real for both England and the United States.
Cumberbatch does a good job portraying Turing as an obsessive and socially distant genius. The filmmakers took the liberty of giving Turing Asperger’s syndrome or some form of autism, even though there is little historical evidence of this. The film chooses to focus on the cracking of Enigma during the war, but the real Alan Turing did far more than that.
The machine he built to decipher Enigma, called the Turing machine, was the world’s first computer. Turing is likely the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. To him, these were simply theories, but as one of the fathers of modern technology and possibly one of the greatest minds that ever lived, his name should be a pretty household one.
It’s not. That’s because his work was a government secret for fifty years after the war, and because of the erasure and shame that came with his exposure as a “puff.” His sentence barred him from his work at the Government Communications Headquarters and silenced the very mind that won the war. Breaking Enigma may have been Turing’s greatest achievement, but at the end of his life, it only added to the wrongness of his mistreatment by the country he saved. He was the least-deserving martyr of an ugly system.
That injustice is only touched upon in the film, reserved for the last scene and a few “what happened next” text blurbs before the credits roll. World War II and Turing’s team of code-breakers overwhelmingly remain the film’s focus. Accordingly, “The Imitation Game” is marketed as a “nail-biting race against time,” but that is a poorly pared-down simplification of Turing’s life.