Art fails to imitate life

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2014)

In a film based on the life of a real person one expects characters to be conflated and timescales compressed; it goes without saying that the role of the hero in events will be exaggerated, while exposition will necessarily be simplified and scenes invented for dramatic purposes. But as the narrative of The Imitation Game lurched from one Hollywood moment to the next, alarm bells began to ring. I know relatively little about Bletchley Park, but I found myself very much doubting that Turing had won World War Two single-handedly and in the teeth of opposition from establishment stereotypes.
I had similar reservations concerning Castles in the Sky, the BBC drama on the wartime development of radar by a group of under-resourced mavericks, but to my delight the events of that film turned out to be firmly grounded in real life. Alas that is not the case here. The events of this film are fabricated to the point where it fails to serve any useful purpose as testimony to the life of its remarkable protagonist. And for an insight into the breaking of the enigma code you might as well watch U-571.
Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is the engine that drives the film, and is very good, though the banalities of the script with which he is working prevent it from being Oscar worthy. Dance, Strong and Goode are sound without being stretched, as are Kinnear, Goodman-Hill and Waddingon as the coppers, but Leech and Knightly fail to suggest the required complexity in their roles. The acting laurels go to Alex Lawther as the young Turing, who does a remarkable job of channelling Cumberbatch's performance while surpassing him in emotional truth.
Michael Apted 2001 drama, Enigma, based on Robert Harris' excellent novel, for all its thriller structure, felt a more truthful testament to the legacy of Bletchley Park than this cheesy, anachronistic hodge-podge.