A Few Words on Historical Inaccuracies in The Imitation Game

I meant to do this post ages ago, soon after my initial review of The Imitation Game.  However, when the monster Alan Turing biography I was reading had to be sent back to the library unfinished, I got sidetracked, and I still haven’t gotten around the checking out the biography again.  (It’s excellent, it’s just very long, and I don’t have the time for it right now.)  Despite this drawback, I realized there are really only two main points that I want to talk about, and I already have enough Turing knowledge to cover them.  The movie has quite a few inaccuracies, big and small, but these are the two that stick in my craw.  Spoilers for The Imitation Game.

First, unfortunately, there’s the characterization of Turing himself.  In my review of the film, I mentioned that Benedict Cumberbatch is reliably great, and he is great – as the character the script has given him.  It’s just so happens that that character really isn’t Alan Turing.  The movie portrays Turing with popular “socially-awkward genius” tropes, and these days, that tends to mean one thing:  Hollywood’s fairly narrow perception of Aspies.  The Turing of the film is content not to relate to people and takes everyone’s words literally.  For example, he doesn’t understand that a colleague telling him they’re heading to lunch is an invitation to join them, and when Joan doesn’t think she can stay at Bletchley as an unmarried woman, he promptly proposes.  Problem – solution.  The film uses these traits to speak to Turing’s initial interest in ciphers.  To him, people speak “in code” all the time, but cryptanalysis at least offers the opportunity to logically decipher the message and discover the true meaning.  He’d much rather tangle with a German Enigma machine than make small-talk with someone. 

Disclaimers:  1) All of these are perfectly reasonable traits to have, 2) not everyone who has them is on the spectrum, 3) Aspies come in all shades (though Hollywood doesn’t seem to know that,) and 4) I have nothing against characters with ASDs being awesome at stuff.  If Turing had been an Aspie, or if he’d been an invented character, my only issue would have been that he was written somewhat stereotypically.  But that’s the thing – Turing wasn’t like that.  He could be shy, he was eccentric (he wore a gas mask when the pollen count was high, and he chained his coffee cup to the radiator,) and he sometimes chose to interpret things literally in order to get by on technicalities (he caused the army a lot of wasted grief by shrewdly neglecting to check a certain box on a certain form.)  He also had a subtle sense of humor and wrote candidly about his anguish to the mother of a deceased friend that he’d loved.  Turing was certainly a socially-awkward genius, but not in the way the movie portrays him.  Why go with a fairly stock character type that bears little resemblance to the main when there’s plenty to be mined from his actual habits and demeanor?

My other major gripe with the film is a subplot in which Turing discovers that his colleague John Cairncross is spying for the Soviets.  It’s true that Cairncross was a double agent working at Bletchley, although he and Turing never crossed paths.  The problem, though, is the reason Turing doesn’t report Cairncross’s activities:  Cairncross threatens to out him.  This is really disappointing to me.  The “lavender scare” of the 1950s forced a lot of gay (or just allegedly-gay) men out of government jobs in the U.S. and U.K. on the grounds that they were a security risk.  The argument was that gay men were easy pickings for Communists because their sexuality made them susceptible to blackmail, and I hate to see exactly that playing out in the story of this brilliant British hero.  There’s just no call for this tasteless, wholly-invented subplot.

The Imitation Game (2014, PG-13)

As soon as I heard about this upcoming movie, I was crazy excited for it.  A biopic about Alan Turing, genius code-breaker who helped dramatically shorten World War II with his technical and mathematical knowhow, British hero who was treated appallingly by his country due to his sexuality?  A fascinating lead character for Benedict Cumberbatch and a host of other fine British actors?  Period costumes, awesome 1940s proto-computers, and ciphers as far as the eye could see?  I was all over that.

So, I was disappointed that it wasn’t everything I wanted it to be.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s a good movie, and I really liked watching it.  However, it’s not without its cinematic issues and, while it’s enjoyable as a movie, it’s problematic as a biopic.  The latter issue is wider in scope and more spoilery than I want to get into for an overall review, so I’ll save the dramatic license for another post.

Film-wise, I only have one major complaint – the movie doesn’t seem to know quite what it wants to be about.  The brunt of the story follows Turing’s work at Bletchley Park during the war, augmented by childhood flashbacks of his earliest love of puzzles/ciphers (as well as boys,) and a police interview during his later legal troubles serves as a framing device for the whole movie.  While the individual scenes flow into one another pretty well and don’t feel disjointed, the film feels a bit at a thematic loss.  It’s not a comprehensive bio, but it’s not an in-depth snapshot either.  The split focus on three different periods of his life don’t quite come together, and in the final scene, it’s clear the movie’s not sure how to reconcile them.

As I said, though, the assorted pieces of the film come off well.  The dialogue is sharp and entertaining, filling us luddites in on the pertinent math without condescending.  I like seeing a war story that’s so far from the front lines, where the battles are waged over radio signals and the heroes’ strongest weapons are their intellects.  I’d heard pre-release rumblings that the film played up Turing’s relationship with colleague Joan Clarke too romantically, but I think they have a good, platonic connection based on their work and mutual fascination with puzzles.

Cumberbatch gives a predictably fantastic performance.  His Turing is piercingly intelligent, and he puts many off with his laser focus and casual arrogance, but Cumberbatch never lets him feel cold.  When Turing fails to connect with others, it’s because they’re a puzzle he doesn’t know how to solve.  Keira Knightley’s Joan is brilliant, gutsy, and perceptive.  Many of the other characters don’t get much focus or nuance, but the rest of the cast provides fine support.  I always like Matthew Goode (though A Single Man is still the first film that comes to mind when I see him,) Mark Strong (admittedly, not my favorite Mr. Knightley, but that’s just because there have been so many great ones) is reliably good, and it’s fun to see Allen Leech outside of Downton Abbey (although hearing him with a Scottish accent rather than Irish was really odd to hear!)  Still, with this film, it’s clearly Cumberbatch’s world, and everyone else just lives in it.

Warnings

Thematic elements, smoking, drinking, and mild sexual references.