- Quick, what do Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? Answer: they're all brilliant innovators portrayed in recent "based on a true story" biopics who also have a reputation for being very difficult people. It's at this point that I must ask: Has there ever been an important person who was also pleasant to be around? Benedict Cumberbatch has now played three abrasive virtuosos in Alan Turing, Julian Assange, and...well, the admittedly fictional Sherlock Holmes. I have difficulty distinguishing how much of this phenomenon reflects real personality patterns and how much is what I call the "Dr. House" effect. Misanthropes can be more interesting than nice people, but does it follow that we should make every protagonist terrible?
- Regardless of more general trends, the interpretation of Alan Turing presented in Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game is unquestionably an arrogant jerk. He's the most brilliant mathematician in England (just ask him!), but it seems like he can't go five minutes without treating someone as though they only recently emerged from the Pleistocene era. Set up as his foils are an equally conceited but far more sociable chess champion (Matthew Goode), an obtuse commanding officer (Charles Dance), and an amusingly manipulative MI-6 agent (Mark Strong). Of his entire cohort (including Allen Leech, Matthew Beard, and James Northcote), the only person who really seems to enjoy Turing's company is the equally intelligent and far more convivial Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). Why couldn't the movie just have been about her?
- The film is naturally anchored around Turing's effort at Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma machine, and the film presents this decidedly technical subject as well as could be imagined. More interesting to me, however, are those aspects of Turing's story that I knew nothing about. According to the film's narrative, his early life (played young by Alex Lawther) was very much shaped by the death of his childhood friend Christopher (Jack Bannon), after whom he named his first code-breaking machine. Rolls off the tongue much better than Bombe, the machine's real name, wouldn't you say? I also had no idea Turing was ever engaged to Joan Clarke, despite the apparently very badly kept secret that he was gay. I had, of course, heard of Turing's later persecution and subsequent suicide, and the movie is to be commended for making somebody as unlikeable as Turing suddenly seem very sympathetic indeed.
- Strangely enough, I found myself impressed by The Imitation Game's non-chronological narrative structure. I say "strangely" because this is hardly a novel narrative device and has certainly worked to the detriment of some lesser biopics, such as the disappointing J. Edgar. In this film, however, it neatly ties together themes that you may not immediately recognize are there. In the past, Turing found himself falling in love with his only friend. In the present, Turing is being investigated by a policeman (Rory Kinnear) for a burglary that reveals a little too much about his personal affairs. And then there's what we assume is the high point of Turing's life, in which he finally succeeds in solving the one puzzle everybody thought was unsolvable. True, I have difficulty understanding or liking Turing, but his tragically short life does make for an interesting tale. By its end, you can almost definitively conclude that he was a human.
- Based largely on Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing.
