Cinema Sunday: The Imitation Game

Today’s Cinema Sunday post is for a movie told over different time frames about an astonishingly gifted scientist who used his vast knowledge as part of a secret government project to help win World War II but after the war is forced to endure assaults on his character and integrity. Now you may think I already wrote about that movie and that movie was Oppenheimer and yes, I did but today’s post is about a different movie that came only nearly 10 years ago.   Today’s Cinema Sunday post is about The Imitation Game (2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, an extraordinarily talented mathematician who cracked the Nazis coded messages in WWII with a machine we now know as the computer.   The movie cuts back and forth over 3 time periods with Turing’s childhood at a prep school, World War II where Turing works to break the German’s Enigma code machine and 1951 where the police are looking at Turing with suspicion.  The prep school years are brutal for Alan as he is the target of harsh and relentless bullying for his extraordinary intellect and for his lack of social skills. His only respite is Christopher, a young man that Alan has a deep and meaningful relationship with.   Young Alan Turing is left alone at the school when Christopher fails to return for a new school year, having reportedly died of tuberculosis.  I saw "reportedly" in that we're only told by the school's head master Christopher's cause of death was tuberculosis.  Given that it appears Alan and Christopher were in an intimate relationship, I have my own distressing suspicions why Christopher died.   In WWII, Turing finds himself in a pickle where his superior intellect and his questionable social skills have put a target on his back. Turing is under constant pressure to produce results NOW to break the German code and Turing is doing this with a team that can barely tolerate his existence.   The Enigma Code is incredibly complex and changes every 24 hours. In order to translate the coded messages the British are intercepting, Turing's team would need to run 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every day.   To help with that impossible task, Turing is building a machine, an advanced calculating machine, what we would call a computer.   Nobody wants Turing's machine.  Nobody believes in it. Alan Turing is building it anyway.  He names the machine "Christopher".    Alan Turing's biggest supporter is Joan Clarke, a young woman who Turing recruits to his team despite everyone else around her questioning why when she is, after all, only a woman.  "Only a woman" who can solve equations faster than any of the men.    When at one point it looks like Joan might leave the program (due to her uptight conservative parents who thinks she should be married by now), in a desperate bid to get her to stay, Alan Turing proposes to her and she accepts. Which is a bit awkward since Alan is a homosexual, a secret he shares with one of his team mates.  Double awkward: the one guy he trusted is a spy.  He later tells Joan who professes not to care. She likes Alan for who he is and wasn't all that worked up about the sex stuff anyway.   Meanwhile, back to the machine... Turing's machine seems a fool's errand, whirling and clacking and shaking like an out of balance washing machine but producing no usable results for cracking the German's Enigma code.   However during a rare social foray at a local pub, a chance comment by one of the team gives Turing an epiphany, an heretofore unconsidered human element what will allow "Christopher" to narrow the search parameters and... DING! Enigma is deciphered!  Due to the super duper secret cone of silence over the project, no one knows of Turing's role in breaking the German code and how that shortened the war and all the lives saved as a result.  Documents are burned and "Christopher" is dismantled.   So in 1951, when the police are called in to investigate a break in at Turing's apartment, they find an odd duck of a mathematician who seems awfully anxious for the police not to investigate the break in.    The police investigation reveals that Alan Turing is a homosexual and he is subsequently arrested and convicted of "indecency" and sentenced to chemical castration.   After years apart, Joan Clarke visits Alan Turing. She still cares about him deeply and is terribly concerned by the quivering shell of the man he used to know. All he wants is to be left alone as attempts to rebuild "Christopher".   By June 1954, Alan Turing commits suicide. It's not until 2013 that Turing's work and reputation is redeemed when Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous Royal Pardon.    To say this movie hits hard is an understatement.  Let me elaborate how The Imitation Game came to my attention in the first place.   The movie is on Netflix and has you hover over the image and title of a show or a movie, a clip plays. In the case of The Imitation Game, the clip is a funny bit with Benedict Cumberbatch channeling "Sherlock" by revealing to the military commander that he knows all about the big secret Enigma project that nobody is supposed to know about.   OK, I knew full well that The Imitation Game was not a comedy and that the whole movie would likely not reflect the lighter tone of that particular scene.  The bulk of the movie takes place during World War II where bombs are falling in London. Of course there will be tragedy and heartbreak. But damn! That ending... Alan Turing endured so much to be come a brilliant mathematician.  Alan Turing suffered so much to be flung into a group of other people and become a leader.  Alan Turing overcame so much to break the damn Nazi code and help win the damn war. Only to be treated as a common criminal for the crime of being "gay" and dying alone in heartbreak and misery, unrewarded and unacknowledged for his service to this country and to the world. Bummer of an ending aside, I will say Benedict Cumberbatch is great in the role of Alan Turing.  Turing's obsessions with math and science do not make him a mere robot; he has passion for things that matter to him.  There may be some concerns that Turing's status as a homosexual is all tell and no show.   The Imitation Game is a very good example of a prestige biopic and is a tale told with heart, humor and, sadly, heartbreak. Next week, we've got a pair of classic film noir entries to discuss including Lucille Ball vs. a serial killer? For realz!