Trite romanticism

Rating: 7/10 (24 February 2015)

The film's main storyline transpires during the war years. While the Allies fight the Germans, the integrity of the quasi-Justice League that Denniston has built at the GC&CS is ostensibly compromised by Turing's incessant belief that the machine he's building will break the Enigma machine. That Winston Churchill himself bankrolls Turing's project when no one else will exudes an air of fiction given the way the narrative is prone to playing such acts of wheeling and dealing for shits and giggles, but the film's faithful replica of the bombe doesn't evoke such frivolity. No one stands before this ominous, monolith-like beacon of promise, with its wall of rotating, ever-clacking drums, without quaking at the thought of what their persistence in cryptanalyzing the Enigma can mean to the war effort. Watching the subservience of the film's characters to the very machine they built, then seeing how this almost existential panic informs "the imitation game" that, years later, Turing plays with Nock at the police station during a battle of wills, is close to a masterstroke.
An ironic masterstroke, as the unease with which the filmmakers articulate Turing's devotion to exploring the possibility of machinery showing intelligent behavior is itself The Imitation Game's only sign of intelligent life. The trajectory of cryptanalyst Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), from her potential being squandered by her parents to her brief engagement to Turing to, finally, her friendly visit with him just prior to his suicide, is a means for the film to slavishly shore up her bona fides as both a feminist and "fag hag." It's a fashionable pose, and given the liberties the film takes here and elsewhere, it's surprising that it refuses to penetrate Turing's carnality and allow Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man's sexuality. It does, though, reduce Turing in his last days to a Gollum-like creature who regards the bombe-like contraption in his flat as a precious reminder of his childhood crush at Sherborne. In this way, this real-life genius, a eunuch even before his castration, remains an enigma, seen only through a lens of psychoanalytically trite pulp romanticism.