The Imitation Game (3/5 Stars)

‘The Imitation Game’ suffers from ‘Mighty Ducks’ syndrome, a disease of storytelling born of its namesake. “The Might Ducks” is a Disney movie starring Emilio Esteves. It was a popular movie that made a lot of money and spawned several sequels, not to mention many ripoffs that seemed to change nothing but the sport i.e. The Little Giants, The Big Green. Ostensibly ‘The Mighty Ducks' is about ice hockey, but curiously the more plausible it seems (and thus more enjoyable) is inversely related to the viewer’s knowledge of ice hockey. That is to say the syndrome refers to a movie that is more effective the less the audience is familiar with its subject matter. Perhaps not coincidentally when the NHL expanded to include a team called the Mighty Ducks their home was Anaheim, California, a place that has never had and never will have ice.

“The Imitation Game,” is a biopic of Alan Turing, the British code-breaker responsible for cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. I am not a code-breaking expert. However I can tell when a movie is deliberately not engaging with its subject matter because it either is not smart enough to explain it or does not believe I am smart enough to understand an explanation. If I were a code-breaking expert, and wanted to see this movie about a famous code-breaker, I would expect to be appalled by the sheer lack of attention paid to the science of breaking codes. It must have taken quite a bit of smarts and hard work to crack Enigma. The movie at least explains why it would be so hard. It is a code that has 150 million million combinations and resets every single day. Alan Turing’s great idea was to create a machine fast enough to go through the combinations in a single day. I have not the slightest clue how Turing came up with that idea or how the machine worked. Here is what the movie was concerned with instead: Turing was not very good at making friends and the people he worked with did not like his dismissive and arrogant attitude. Therefore, according to the movie, in order to break the code and win the war Turing has to draw up enough social grace to give apples to his colleagues and tell a joke about a bear in the woods. That (and not his genius) is what won over the room so they could finally work out his idea.

Anyone with some concept of how dangerous the World War going on outside will understand how petty this movie’s insistence on the importance of social drama was to the greater scheme of things. And anyone with some concept of how code-breaking machines work will be eternally frustrated with how the movie completely sidesteps any discussion of code-breaking theory. And anyone who has some respect for the intelligence of past generations will roll their eyes at the way the screenwriter has chosen to dumb down the characters in order to help what they must have assumed to be a pitifully ill informed modern audience. A good example is when the codebreakers are first presented with a stolen Enigma machine. One of the men asks why they don’t just type an intercepted radio code into it. The makers of the movie (Director Morten Tyldum, screenwriter Graham More) are under the impression that the audience does not know that Enigma is more complicated than that, so not unlike a sacrificial lamb given unto slaughter to sate the gods of idiots a real historical figure has been made to pretend he is not smart enough to know not to ask stupid questions. A little later in the same scene the head of MI:6, the British secret service, is introduced. Another poor bastard asks, “But the military only has five divisions.” No shit. The Secret Service is secret. Why would a person hired to break a top secret Nazi code be adamant about the impossibility of a secret intelligence division in the army when he is literally already apart of it? Quack, Quack, Quack!

This stupid pandering to modern sensibilities reaches the level of questionable storytelling ethics when it concerns the homosexuality of its subject Alan Turing. We all know now that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, the key word being ‘now.’ They did not know that then. Alan Turing probably did not even know that then. The way to honor the experience of real people is to show what it was like through their eyes. But here whenever a character learns of Turing’s homosexuality they not only know what it is literally, but also act as if they do not believe it is a moral choice of Turing’s. Furthermore are sympathetic to him even the policeman who, more than anybody else, has no historical reason to be. These are reactions that supposedly take place side by side in a time period where Turing would later be chemically castrated by the government for his homosexuality and eventually commit suicide. If you want to see how a movie should treat something like this, I recommend “Far From Heaven.” Or not pay attention to it at all. If you asked Alan Turing what he felt was most interesting about his character, do you suspect he would mention his homosexuality or the giant precomputer he spent day and night developing for years. How about we focus on that a little?

There is a reason to see this movie though and that is the always-superb performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. The man has made a career out of playing geniuses such as Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein and here he does another version of a very smart man. His Turing is a far less smooth and confident as his Sherlock, but the underlying intelligence is immediately apparent. Turing apparently had a stammer and Cumberbatch performs it well. So that’s good. But hold fast, and I wonder if anyone else picked up on this. Take the character that Keira Knightley plays. She gets a job as a codebreaker by filling out an extremely hard crossword in the London paper and finishing an unfinishable test before a classroom of other applicants. So she too is super duper smart. Amazingly though, she is not beset with the quirks and characteristics of a genius that Cumberbatch brings to his role. She spends a great more time on screen being a love interest/plucky feminist than being a nerd that's very good at math. What’s going on there you may ask? Or not ask. I don’t think anybody but me has.

What stops these performances from being awards worthy has more to do with the mediocre movie that they are attached to. This one has been getting awards buzz lately. I don’t agree with that. And I also think it was a rip-off of “A Beautiful Mind,” to have the breakthrough in the code-breaking take place in a bar in a scene concerned with the unspoken code of human mating habits. For fuck's sake Hollywood not everything is about sex.

 I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best when he was asked about, “The Social Network.”

“The whole framing of the movie is I’m with this girl who doesn’t exist in real life who then dumps me…and basically the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls or get into some social institution…It’s such a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think of what we do in Silicon Valley, building stuff. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” (cue wild applause from audience of engineers)

Exactly.