Secrets, All Kinds of Secrets.

Rating: 7/10 (24 May 2015)

It's difficult to show Benedict Cumberbatch, as Alan Turing, trying to figure out how to break the German Enigma code during World War II, just as it's difficult to show the effort being put into any cognitive enterprise. That's the trouble with making movies about writers, puzzle solvers, and chess players. You can't show them as action figures, shooting up a place, killing enemies by the thousands, wrenching heads off. The result is that you wind up concentrating on the drama of the personality itself. The protagonist's social relations, his triumphs and tribulations, his strengths and weaknesses.
This one begins in 1951 with the oddball Cumberbatch dismissing the police from his room after an apparent break in, but we're soon back to 1939, with Cumberbatch newly out of Cambridge and recruited by "MI-6", which doesn't exist and is devoted to the breaking of Enigma at the famous Bletchley Park. The introductory scenes are sometimes amusing. Cumberbatch, always polite, seems to have no sense of humor and interprets expressions literally. His handful of colleagues stand up at noon and ask if Cumberbatch is hungry too. "Yes, I'm hungry, he replies, but he doesn't get up and join them because no one asked him to. They only asked him if he was hungry. When a colleague comes up with a useful suggestion, his way of saying thank you is, "That's not an entirely terrible idea."His artlessness is taken for arrogance and he's generally disliked except for one of his brilliant young colleagues, Keira Knightley. (Lucky him.) He likes her too but not for her contours because he turns out to be a pouf. That was a serious crime in England until 1967.
Instead of trying to figure out how Enigma's decoding machine worked -- Polish scientists had brought one to England -- he decided to build a machine that would defeat the machine. Promoted to head of the department at Bletchley, he recruited more members for his team by publishing a crossword puzzle in the newspapers. "If you can solve this puzzle in ten minutes or less call this number for an exciting and rewarding career." And the tradition of British crossword puzzles is that they are notoriously hard. "Name a seed you put in the garage." (Caraway.) "Name a major seaport in the middle of Czechoslovakia." (Oslo.) Those are examples from a recent edition of the London Times.
The head honcho at MI-6 despises Cumberbatch and his gang and is just about to shut the whole affair down when there occurs a "Man in the White Suit" moment. Bingo. The first German encrypted message is disencrtyped by Enigma which, with a bang, turns from a huge, noisy, whirling machine into a silent and obedient servant, standing at attention and waiting for more orders. It IS a big machine too, affectionately named Christopher. It would take up half a garage. I'm glad they didn't go too deeply -- or at all, in fact -- into decoding. I never got past Sherlock Holmes and the Dancing Men.
Cumberbatch does fine by the role of the eccentric Alan Turing. He's extremely amusing when he's trying to humanize himself by telling a joke that he doesn't really get. Keira Knightley is Keira Knightly, she of the exquisite iliac crests. Nobody in the supporting cast delivers a weak performance.
The story switches without any jolts between 1928, 1941, and 1951, and it follows a familiar trajectory. Someone who is a genius at something, whether maths, the trumpet, or baseball, fights inner demons and is almost destroyed by them. Or sometimes, as here, is himself destroyed.