One of the best films I've seen in the last year, THE IMITATION GAME is part thriller and part World War II drama built around a moving character study of an unsung war hero.
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, a brilliant, socially inept mathematician who approaches the British armed forces and tells them that he would like to help break the Enigma code.
Enigma was an ingenious coding machine created by the Nazis through which they filtered every communication to their dominant and advancing forces across Europe.
The genius of Enigma was that its code changes every night at midnight, giving English forces and their allies only 24 hours to crack a mystery with 150 million, million possible solutions.
Turing goes his own way, envisioning a huge, hulking machine that will solve the riddle much more quickly than any human could. As you see the machine come together, you'll recognize those first IBM computers that filled massive clean rooms in the sixties and probably had less active memory than my MacBook Pro.
Screenwriter Graham Moore won an Oscar for his screenplay, which deftly pops back and forth between Turning and his team trying to solve the Enigma in 1941 and Turing's life in 1951.
As a quietly gay man in the early fifties, Turing becomes the object of a tenacious detective's inquiries. The detective believes Turning is a spy, not knowing that his secret is something much more personal. Moore then starts weaving in flashbacks to Turning's formative years at school, where he is bullied and berated for being different by his classmates.
As the past illuminates Turing's behavior and the events of 1941 define the man's achievements, it makes the true life events of 1951 all the more shocking.
Keira Knightly plays the lone woman on Turing's team who becomes a close friend and confidant. Charles Dance brings all his "Game of Thrones" regal weight to the role of Commander Denniston, who sees Turing's project as a waste of time and money. Dance and Cumberbatch are performing at a high level and Knightly gets somewhat swept off the screen.
Vivid scenes of the Nazi bombings of London are sprinkled throughout, giving extra weight to the urgency of cracking Enigma.
Cumberbatch is excellent as Turing. He conveys the intelligence, pain and painfully socially inept sides of Turing perfectly. As events later in life unfold, he's created a portrait of a real man so vividly that the viewer is horrified at how the country that he served so well, treated him later in life.
The details of the story beyond these are better experienced unlocked one at a time. Like Turing's massive machine, as the pieces of the story lock in one at a time, the power of Alan Turning's life reveals messages we can all learn from and avoid many years later.
Early in the film, Turing asks a key player in the story, 'Are you paying attention?".
It's a call for all of us. The fact that Turning's story was kept secret for 50 years is a tragedy.
Thankfully, THE IMITATION GAME tells that story beautifully and gets an A.
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