A good film - a crowd-pleaser, but could have been a great film.

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2014)

In the last couple of weeks, I have seen 2 biographical films. Yesterday, The Imitation Game and and previously Mr Turner. I rated Turner as a 9 out of 10 because it was, as a film, a masterpiece. It was not though a "crowd pleaser" i.e. full of romance, humour etc. Imitation Games by contrast is a "crowd pleaser" - and more on the humour in a moment. It is not a masterpiece partly because of this but mainly because it singularly failed to convey the atmosphere of those times without descending into farce. You only had to listen to the constant laughter in the cinema to realise that the director's attempts to make a dumbed-down crowd-pleaser had worked, but to the great detriment of the film. I guess he was concerned that cryptography would be dull, whereas in fact the way he explained all of that was very good and the farce elements were thus unnecessary. I have to admit that I have studied the Enigma machine and been to Bletchley as well as studying the history and current uses of cryptography so I come at this with a fair knowledge of what the film was about and of Turing himself. The story itself was reasonably accurately told and the audience have not been misled.
Turing's team were sadly misrepresented by abysmal miscasting. To use Allen Leech from Downton Abbey was a bizarre decision particularly (crown-pleasing again perhaps) because he acted and spoke exactly the same is he does in that popular TV show which causes great confusion - why is Tom in this film you brain asks you! Matthew Goode was also totally out of place in every respect. In absolute contrast, that fine actor Rory Kinnear was totally believable as the detective - if he can use a Manchester accent, why cannot Leech use a different accent? Inexcuseable.
But, in contrast to these failings, Cumberbatch made the part his own. Extrordinary acting of the highest calibre. There was no confusion between Turing and Sherlock. Without Cumberbatch, this film would sink but with him, it becomes a very good film indeed despite it's other problems. Other actors that turned-in fine performances included Charles Dance and surprisingly Keira Knightley.
Oscar Faura's normally excellent photography was something of a disappointment - nothing wrong with it, but lacking in any sort of commitment (a real contrast to Dick Pope's in Turner). There was quite a bit of CGI used to represent scenes of devastation caused by bombing, and these were simple dreadful, lacking any realism at all - presumably they ran out of budget. Using digital instead of film might have helped here! Faura should see Pope's work on Turner to see how much better digital can be and at much less cost.
Now, I said I would come on to humour. We used to laugh at stammering, at people with deformities, at people of short stature. They were set-up by directors for laughs. Thank goodness, we have all moved on from that. I say all, because Morten Tyldum has clearly not done so and believes that making laughs from people's conditions is just fine. Alan Turing's tendency to be severely logical - beyond the point of social survival - may in the end be what killed him. This can appear as a symptom of Asperger's Syndrome - a form of autism claimed to be associated with mathematicians and computer scientists. Henry O'Connell and Michael Fitzgerald suggest this might be the diagnosis warranted for Turing, in a paper published in the 'Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine'. So, Tyldum thinks it is fine to mock and encourage his audience to laugh at someone who had a condition - one that probably caused him to take his own life.
Unfortunately Tyldum's lack of thought and lack of sensitivity runs right through this film from the casting, the cinematography, the dreadful CGI and ultimately the cheap crowd-pleasing. A shame that Cumberbatch could not have influenced Tyldum but clearly he did not not.
All this aside, it's a good film to see - especially if you are one of the diminishing number who don't know about Turing already. If you see Cumberbatch you will have seen Turing. I hope you understand him, value his genius and that you don't laugh at him.