Flawed genius, flawed movie

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2014)

This is not the first movie to investigate the Bletchley Park team that cracked the Nazi Enigma code and hastened Germany's defeat. This version puts a lot more meat on the bones of the code-breakers' story and, more importantly, gives mathematician Alan Turing the full credit for his role as creator of the Ultra machine that finally broke the code. We now know that Turing is part parent, part midwife, to today's PCs and iPads and Smartphones.
We also know that Turing was a homosexual in an era when gays were prosecuted and cruelly punished, although the writer and director of THE IMITATION GAME seem to be unsure about how far to go in exploring this side of Turing's fatally (as it would prove) flawed genius. Flashbacks to his boarding school days show geeky Alan clumsily and inarticulately in love with a fellow pupil, but his great love in the Bletchley Park period is Joan (Keira Knightley), the only female on the team. Benedict Cumberbatch perfectly catches the adult Alan's equally clumsy courtship of Joan, whom he loves but does not desire.
The moral dilemma the Bletchley Park team - and the government - faced once they had broken the German code is chillingly presented but the movie's fatal flaw, for me, was in declaring Turing's homosexuality (and its terrible consequences) but not exploring it in any depth. We see the postwar police doggedly building a case against him, but we get few clues as to the kind of gay man he was. Perhaps Benedict was OK about playing gay but didn't want to fully "do" gay?
What the Turing movie needed, I think, were a couple of the scenes like Gary Oldman had in PRICK UP YOUR EARS, candidly but not not too explicitly showing Joe Orton's naughty weakness for cottaging and rent boys. THE IMITATION GAME is a visual feast with well-judged performances from the entire cast, but it settles for being a Merchant Ivory-style period piece with (as the poster proclaims) more than one enigma at its centre. This is not the definitive biography of Alan Turing.