By any measure, “The Imitation Game” is a marked improvement over Michael Apted’s 2001 “Enigma,” a dreary, dramatically inert potboiler starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet as fictionalized versions of Turing and fellow cryptanalyst Joan Clarke, who was also briefly Turing’s fiancee — until he confessed his homosexuality and broke off the engagement. In adapting Andrew Hodges’ Turing biography, “The Enigma,” first-time screenwriter Graham Moore seems to have made a close study of Aaron Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network,” which “The Imitation Game” resembles in its flashback structure, many scenes of geeky young men huddled over complex algorithms, and its central conception of Turing as an Aspergian outcast who makes up in haughty, condescending attitude what he lacks in basic social graces. That’s not a bad model to work from, though Moore has also picked up a few less desirable habits from those screenwriting seminars that encourage writers to do things like having multiple characters articulate the theme of the movie in a nifty, self-empowering mantra: “Sometimes it’s the people no one expects anything from who do the things no one expects,” which becomes “The Imitation Game’s” version of “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Of course, in the England of Turing’s time, with the Victorian-era Labouchere Amendment still in effect, being gay meant having to say you were sorry all the time — provided you were unlucky enough to be caught in the act, as Turing was in 1952, arrested on charges of “gross indecency” stemming from his affair with a 19-year-old male drifter. (Two years later, Turing killed himself at the age of 41.) “The Imitation Game” begins there, using Turing’s interrogation by a sympathetic policeman (Rory Kinnear) as a framing device that offers a practical explanation for the character’s running voiceover narration. We then jump back to 1939 and the early days of England’s entrance into the war, where the 27-year-old Turing applies for a top-secret post working on the decryption of the seemingly “unbreakable” German cipher machine called Enigma, used by the Nazis to encode all military radio transmissions from ordinary weather reports to valuable tactical maneuvers.
Turing lands the gig at Bletchley Park, home to the Government Code and Cypher School, where he plays poorly with others, alienating his fellow codebreakers and clashing repeatedly with his bosses (a wonderfully starchy Charles Dance as a seen-it-all Royal Navy Commander and Mark Strong as a cagey MI6 agent). When Turing chafes at being second banana to the Enigma team’s de facto leader — suave national chess champion Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode in a variation on Andrew Garfield’s “Social Network” character) — he appeals his case directly to Winston Churchill, who responds (in the very next scene) by putting Turing in charge. And just about everything in the first half of “The Imitation Game” has a similar, overly tidy feel of real life reduced to anecdotal zingers. When Turing holds a kind of open audition to recruit new team members, you know that Clarke (Keira Knightley), the lone woman in the group, won’t just turn out to be as good as the men, but even better. And when Turing finally has his Enigma-busting eureka moment, it’s due to one of those random happy accidents, like the apocryphal apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head.
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