By Michael Nordine | Indiewire August 30, 2014 at 9:56AM
The plight of British scientist Alan Turing is capably documented in Morten Tyldum’s Oscar season entry.
Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘The Imitation Game’ Photo: Reprint from Indiewire.com
The movies love to remind us that brilliant minds are often the most tortured. Far be it from Morten Tyldum to suggest any differently in “The Imitation Game,” a World War II procedural detailing the efforts of cryptanalyst Alan Turing and his mathematically-inclined underlings to decrypt the Nazis’ famed Enigma machine and turn the tides in England’s favor. There’s more than one way to become a wartime casualty, however, and their secret office is its own sort of front line.
As played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Turing is a genius in the “The Social Network” and “A Beautiful Mind” mold: brilliant but utterly lacking interpersonal skills, with an added dash of Drax the Destroyer’s literal-minded humorlessness. Perpetually stone-faced, he’s frequently lost in thought at the expense of those trying to reach him on even the most basic level; it’s to the movie’s credit that there’s no hokey attempt at visualizing his brilliance via superimposed swirls and flashes of light, as is often done in films of this sort.
Even in his most intimate, wrenching scenes, Turing is at a remove from both the audience and the people working alongside him. Rather than frustrate, this distance serves to underscore his status as a double outsider — in addition to possibly having Asperger syndrome, Turing was a homosexual, something the film reveals in an off-the-cuff manner befitting the man’s personality. It deeply affects him, but not in a way he’s willing to show the world.
Kiera Knightly, Matthew Goode (center behind Benedict) and Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘The Imitation Game’ Photo: Reprint from Indiewire.com