Watching “The Imitation Game” is like seeing a bottle of Cheval Blanc fed into a Slurpee machine.
The story of the British genius Alan Turing — who helped crack Germany’s WWII code, accidentally invented the computer and was later involved in a gross injustice — is replete with amazement and heartbreak.
His memory deserves better than this sometimes absorbing, sometimes trite and meretricious melodrama.
The film slips back and forth among three settings: 1951 Manchester, where Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is investigated by police after a strange burglary; a WWII radio factory where Turing joins a team gathered to crack the German Enigma code; and school days in the 1920s, when Turing’s semiautistic personality got him bullied by the other boys.
Turing, a literal-minded young Cambridge scholar who can crack any puzzle but is puzzled by jokes, is portrayed as a stereotypical screen rebel forever running afoul of a starchy authority figure — the officer (Charles Dance) who would fire him if not for orders issued by Winston Churchill.
Advertising for fellow cryptanalysts by posting a crossword puzzle in the newspaper, he becomes close friends with one codebreaker, Joan (Keira Knightley). But even as Turing bests one Enigma, other riddles emerge: What happened to him in boarding school, and why are those 1951 bobbies so interested in a break-in in which nothing was stolen?
Intertwining the three story lines allows Norwegian director Morten Tyldum to generate suspense and momentum, and there are some affecting moments, notably when Turing’s bizarre contraption, an
early computer, finally breaks Enigma. What follows is sheer ironic anguish: The code is so important that the machine mustn’t be used, so the Germans won’t suspect the Allies are reading their mail.
Tyldum indulges Cumberbatch, who would have been wiser to stick to the clipped, soul-imprisoned style he showed in “Parade’s End.” Instead, he overplays the role, fretting and moaning and shuddering when he isn’t being cluelessly Spock-like for comic relief. The character is meant to be repressed, not a fussy bundle of nerves.
Instead of delving into the code-cracking, Tyldum is more interested in being colorful — in restaging “A Beautiful Mind” with British accents.
He belabors both the conflict with authority and the point that Turing was an oddball who couldn’t even accept a lunch invitation without quibbling over the literal meaning of the words. In order to cram in a mention of the famous thought experiment named for the mathematician, Tyldum awkwardly frames a police interview as a kind of Turing test.
These are unforgivably Hollywood-ish embellishments of a story that needed none. Still, Turing’s tale needs to be more widely known, and while “The Imitation Game” may not be a great film, it is an important one.