The Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game is an absorbing wartime drama that makes Alan Turing a little too easy to explain. It wants the code-breaking to supply the suspense and the man doing it to give that suspense some feeling. For much of its 113 minutes, that works: the technical problem is clear enough to follow, and Benedict Cumberbatch makes concentration interesting to watch. We recommend it, with reservations about how neatly Graham Moore’s screenplay accounts for a difficult life.

The wartime work, the glimpses of Turing’s youth and the postwar police investigation give the film three ways into its subject. William Goldenberg’s editing keeps those strands legible, so moving between them seldom means having to work out where we are. The cost is a tendency to make one period explain another before we have had much chance to think. A biographical drama can leave a little more unresolved without becoming a cryptography examination.

Benedict Cumberbatch gives the film its most persuasive moments by letting Turing’s certainty about his work coexist with uncertainty around other people. The social awkwardness can be pushed too hard, especially when it becomes the chief way of telling us how exceptional he is. Yet the performance also allows hurt to register without making him agreeable. We were moved by the warmth Keira Knightley brings to Joan Clarke’s dealings with him; her patience makes his difficulty accepting company seem painful rather than merely eccentric.

Óscar Faura’s cinematography gives the period setting a composed, careful finish, though there is little here to disturb the familiar look of a respectable historical drama. Maria Djurkovic’s production design is more satisfying in its attention to the machine, which becomes something we can invest in without understanding every part. We want the thing to work. That attachment helps the technical passages, where a more exhaustive explanation of the calculations would have served neither the pace nor the people.

Alexandre Desplat’s music helps maintain that urgency, although its emotional guidance can feel unnecessary beside the performances. The larger problem is Graham Moore’s insistence on making personality so readily understandable. Social difficulty, exceptional ability and private pain fit together with a convenience that makes the writing feel arranged for our benefit. The screenplay’s sympathy is welcome, but it could trust us to care about Turing without supplying so many explanations for his behaviour.

The film is also cautious about Turing’s sexuality, treating it chiefly as a secret and a source of suffering. That narrows the person we are being asked to understand, and leaves the code-breaking with more room to develop than his private life. This is a familiar weakness of the biopic about a gifted outsider: the injustice receives attention that might also have been given to ordinary pleasures and attachments. Keira Knightley’s warmth supplies some of that missing sense of an everyday life, though she cannot repair the omission.

Still, the suspense survives those limitations, and the cast gives this orderly film enough warmth to keep it from becoming a lesson. It is good at making specialised work matter to people who could not begin to do it themselves. Within the conventions of the historical thriller, its clarity and pace are considerable virtues. Choose it for an evening of code-breaking and human friction, then leave room for a less simplified account of Turing.