Morten Tyldum (2014)

Alan Turing is renowned for his cryptographic endeavours at Bletchley Park; widely regarded as (in the words of Wikipedia) ‘the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence’; and commemorated as a grievously wronged homosexual.  The Imitation Game is, in theory anyway, the culmination of the attention that’s been paid in recent years to what Turing did for his country (and the world) during the 1940s and what his country did to him in the early 1950s.  In 2010, Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for ‘the appalling way’ in which Turing was treated following his prosecution in 1952 for homosexual acts.  In 2013, the Queen granted him a posthumous pardon for the crime of gross indecency of which he’d been convicted.  The royal pardon is summarised in one of several legends at the end of Morten Tyldum’s film.  These have an anxiously insistent feel:  you’re being told not to forget you’ve been watching An Important Movie.  First, there’s a reminder of the crucial importance of the breaking of the Germans’ Enigma code – ‘historians’ reckon this shortened the war by two years and saved very many lives.  The final legend notes the influence of ‘Turing machines’:  ‘Today we call them computers …’   In between, there’s a statement that thousands of men were imprisoned in Britain for homosexual acts in the period from 1885[1] to 1967; this is followed by a summary of Turing’s pardon, noting his ‘exceptional achievements’.

The juxtaposition of these two legends is logical but the words on screen unfortunately imply that the royal pardon was thanks only to those ‘exceptional achievements’.  The pardon gives rise to various objections and questions.   It seems not to make technical sense:  since homosexual acts were illegal at the time and there’s no suggestion that Turing didn’t take part in them, this was not a miscarriage of justice.  If Turing deserves to be pardoned for his conviction under a law that is viewed today as morally indefensible then why don’t others?  (And, if all those convicted for homosexuality were to be pardoned, posthumously or otherwise, why not move on to people charged under other obsolete laws?)  Is a reason for the apology that Turing, instead of serving a prison term, chose the alternative that was offered to him of chemical castration?  (How unusual was that ‘treatment’ – and choice?)

It isn’t the responsibility of Morten Tyldum to answer those questions but it’s surely an omission that – despite the message of the closing legends that Alan Turing’s sexuality is a crucial element of his life story – the film is opaque about his private life.  The main emotional attachment that Turing develops is during adolescence, with Christopher Morcom, a fellow schoolboy at Sherborne.  Thanks largely to the performance of Alex Lawther as the early teenage Turing, the flashbacks to Sherborne are, for the most part, one of the strongest elements of The Imitation Game.  After flaccid scene-setting and cross-cutting between Manchester in 1951, when the police are called to investigate a robbery at Turing’s home (an incident which leads to his own eventual arrest), and his arrival at Bletchley Park at the outbreak of war in 1939, the first Sherborne sequences have an immediacy and an upsetting charge.  The boy Alan, who painstakingly separates the different types of vegetable on his school lunch plate, has a tray of carrots and peas emptied onto his head.  He is then buried by other boys under the floorboards of the dining hall; Christopher Morcom (Jack Bannon) rescues him.  As their friendship grows, Christopher and Alan develop a private code for the transmission of messages; the film doesn’t explore whether their affection for each other is expressed in other ways but, when the headmaster (Laurence Kennedy) breaks to Alan the news of Christopher’s death from bovine tuberculosis, Alex Lawther shows compellingly Turing’s intense determination to deny the emotional importance of what he’s being told.  Christopher is the name that Turing gives to the code-breaking machine that he builds at Bletchley and its replacement, constructed in his post-war home on the outskirts of Manchester (from 1948, he worked at Manchester University).

The impression you get that Turing’s first love was his greatest, perhaps his only true one, is the result of not only the strength of feeling that Alex Lawther conveys but also the character of the adult Turing that the screenwriter Graham Moore has created and Benedict Cumberbatch interprets – a man who it’s hard to imagine being capable of an intimate relationship of any duration.  Although there’s a real spiritual continuity between Lawther and Cumberbatch, the latter’s portrait of a closed-off genius verges on cliché.  Cumberbatch’s Turing is monomaniacal in the pursuit of his science and borderline autistic in his mannerisms; fanatically literal-minded, he lacks social skills and understanding.  Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) is a key member of Turing’s group at Bletchley; they become engaged so that (according to the film) he can retain her exceptional cryptographic skills; but Turing, anxious about their sexual incompatibility, confides in a male colleague that he’s gay and that he’s ‘had affairs with men’.  You wonder what these ‘affairs’ amounted to.  Were they more than casual pick-ups, or attempted pick-ups, in pubs, of the kind that took place shortly before the break-in – carried out by the pick-up and a pal – at Turing’s home in 1951?

Neither the title of the film nor its protagonist, as the subject of biographical drama, is new to the screen.  The Imitation Game, written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, was a BBC Play for Today in 1980.  It focused principally on a woman (played by Harriet Walter) working at Bletchley Park during World War II but featured a significant male character, Turner (Nicholas Le Prevost), who had more in common with Alan Turing than the first three letters of his surname.  In the mid-1990s, Hugh Whitemore adapted his stage play, Breaking the Code, for television:  Herbert Wise directed and Derek Jacobi (who had also played the role in the theatre) was Turing.  Enigma, a crudely effective page-turner by Robert Harris (published in 1995), tells the story of the Bletchley code-breakers without including a recognisable Turing figure among them:  it became a cinema film, directed by Michael Apted, in 2001.  In spite of these progenitors, Alan Turing’s life is so extraordinary that it would seem a challenge to turn it into biopic boilerplate but The Imitation Game is an indifferent, unimaginative piece of storytelling.

This is the Norwegian Morten Tyldum’s first feature in English (he’s best known for the 2011 film of Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters) and his direction is uncertain. There are numerous scenes which, even if the events they describe really happened, come across as phony because they’re generic and staged in a lacklustre way.  A few examples.  Joan Clarke arrives late for the exam for potential Bletchley Park recruits and, because she’s female, is assumed to be a candidate for a secretarial job; she then wows the male assembly, Turing included, by completing the exam in double-quick time.  The code-breaking team’s other members – who, up to this point, have seemed to find him a pain in the neck – all stand up for Turing, when their pompously hostile boss (Charles Dance) tries to fire him.  The eureka moment occurs when a chance remark enables Turing to crack the Enigma code and he and his team race back from the pub, past security men and into Bletchley Park’s Hut 8.  The schoolboy Alan waits, at the start of a new term, for the return of his friend and watches all the boys in the school arrive back in the Sherborne quad – all except Christopher …

The Manchester sequences contain some gross anachronisms:  a police detective (Rory Kinnear) talks about the likes of Burgess and McLean being ‘radicalised’ and uses Tipp-Ex (first marketed in 1956); his superintendent (Steven Waddington) has designer stubble.  Morten Tyldum includes a mishmash of World War II newsreel footage, which is strong, and CGI simulations of warfare and other reconstructions, which are lame.  When the Germans surrender, Tyldum gets together a crowd to enact Victory in Europe celebrations in the grounds of Bletchley Park for the sole purpose of pulling back to reveal the scene being watched from inside a window:  a stunning waste of budget.  The director seems worried too that the audience may get bored: there can be no other reason for pouring Alexandre Desplat’s tiresome music over the soundtrack.  When, near the end of the film, Turing has been convicted and Joan Clarke visits him at his home near Manchester, the scene gives Benedict Cumberbatch the opportunity for a big finish (which he takes) but is confusing in all sorts of ways.  Has Turing asked the now married Joan to visit or does she happen to drop by?  (The real Joan Clarke was living in Scotland at the time.)  Tyldum has already shown on the screen a newspaper report of Turing’s conviction yet, in her conversation with him, Joan alarmedly asks if he realises ‘ … how serious this is – you could go to prison!’  (Since he’s opted for chemical castration rather than jail, you wonder what that newspaper report said.)

Benedict Cumberbatch demonstrates a great deal of technical skill, even if some of the vocal and gestural mannerisms he’s developed for the role don’t seem fully absorbed:  on the whole, I found him more persuasive (because less calculated) when he was reacting to other characters than when he made the running in a scene.  Among the other men on Turing’s team at Bletchley Park, Matthew Goode does creditably in spite of looking miscast for as long as the character he’s playing is meant to be a cool, snooty rival to Turing.  Keira Knightley is better than she often is but still rather bland (as well as too glamorous) as Joan Clarke.  The BBC screened Enigma to coincide with the release of The Imitation Game:  watching Kate Winslet in the earlier movie makes you all the more aware of the telling details of character and the eccentric energy that are missing from Knightley’s performance.   Enigma is mediocre – it’s essentially a plot and the purpose of its cardboard characters is to drive that plot forward – but Winslet’s characterisation of a Joan Clarke type and, in a broader vein, Jeremy Northam’s turn as a super-suave MI5 man make it worth watching, and at least the film’s intentions are clear, unlike some aspects of Morten Tyldum’s film.  The Imitation Game does, however, feature an excellent performance from Mark Strong, as the military intelligence chief, Stewart Menzies.  Alan Turing, although he can decipher the impossible, can never read this man.  Mark Strong’s well-judged blend of firmness and calm gives him a quiet edge:  Menzies is always one step ahead, so always dangerous.

18 November 2014

[1]  This was the year in which revised legislation, enshrined in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, took effect (although that isn’t mentioned in the text on screen).