A mediocre passing glance at Alan Turing's life

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2014)

What a fascinating subject Alan Turing is for a biographer! He's considered the godfather of computer science, a verifiable genius mathematician – some would call him a prodigy. He, along with his team of code breakers, helped win World War II for the Allies by building the world's first complex reprogrammable computer that enabled them to decrypt Germany's coded messages that included strategic coordinates among many other top secret information. And oh yeah, he was gay and eventually committed suicide after being ordered by a court of law to cure himself of his homosexuality by taking experimental hormone treatments among many other horrific methods. But enough about all that, we've got a war to win!
Director Morten Tyldum was obviously taken by Turing's entire life story and who could blame him? The bulletpoints above only begin to chip away at the myriad layers of the man. That Tyldum set out to chronicle Turing's life isn't the issue; that he chose to whittle it down to a tidy hour and fifty-five minute melodrama is where you can start to point fingers. But I hope you have a lot of fingers because The Imitation Game has more issues than that.
Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Star Trek: Into Darkness) with all the subtlety of a cannon being fired off in a tea room. He's a powderkeg of ticks and twitches that actually gives his character the only nuance that this script will allow. Yes, Alan Turing is a character in The Imitation Game, a biopic about Alan Turing the human being. Other characters include: the entire cast – also representing real human beings who actually existed – consisting of Kiera Knightley, Matthew Goode (Watchmen, Match Point), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), Rory Kinnear (Penny Dreadful, Skyfall) among others. While there's nothing wrong with these performances per se, it's distracting from start to finish just how aware you are that these are actors giving performances. There's no room to just breathe and lose yourself in the human drama without constantly being nudged by the film itself, urging you to behold that very human drama playing out on screen. Knightley's performance rises to the top of the heap by default based on the fact that she just doesn't have as many bombastic lines of dialogue as her costars.
We spend the first half of the film being introduced to everyone – literally. In fact, much of The Imitation Game is made up expository dialogue, right down to the bitter end, which we'll get to. We're told who's who, who does what, and so on by way of characters stiffly (or, in some cases, exaggeratedly) announcing this information for the sake of the audience. We're given facts and dates and endless information that you almost forget this is supposed to be a movie and not a basic history lesson for children. Ideas and phrases are introduced and repeated, ad nauseam. Again, distracting from the narrative and instead frustrating and annoying to anyone actually paying attention, which the film specifically asks of us in its in media res opening sequence.
It's unclear how many hands were in the pot during the production process but The Imitation Game has the feel of a collaborative effort gone wrong. It seems as though Morten Tyldum only wanted to tell the story of Turing's war effort (crack the code, win the war) but this film isn't satisfied with just showing us that. We go back into Turing's past, we jump toward the end of his life, we're all over the place but we don't flesh out his character nearly enough during these sequences for it to have any significance. Why even bother delving into the man's past or future when you can't even bring him to life – at no fault of Cumberbatch's – during the era you've dedicated the most film to? Once again: distracting and frustrating. Even in the end we're treated to a half-assed title card informing us of what ultimately happened at the end of Turing's life. Yes, you read that correctly. The most tragic part of Alan Turing's story is relayed to the audience via text on the screen. This not only reeks of studio involvement, it just flat out reeks a stench of which I can't accurately describe.
The Imitation Game is an incredibly uneven film with terrific actors belting out ham-fisted lines and gorgeous cinematography shoddily edited together and curiously paced. When it's not hammering you over the head with its big ideas, it's zipping through the man's life like a high school student cramming for an exam. I'm reminded of Ed Harris' Jackson Pollock biopic, Pollock which set out to earnestly tell the story of a misunderstood genius but ended up falling prey to many of the same pitfalls as The Imitation Game. I honestly don't think anyone set out to make a mediocre film here, but that's just what it ends up being. Hopefully a film will one day come along that can crack the code of Alan Turing's incredibly fascinating life story but The Imitation Game is not that film.