The Imitation Game review

              As a classically presented movie’s-movie “The Imitation Game” is sufficiently, and perhaps superficially, entertaining. The actor’s performances are strong, the direction by Mortem Tyldum is confident, and the production design and attention to period detail is convincing enough to capture an audience’s attention. That said, as a historical document and as a year-end awards contender, the film fails to sell its ethos in a sincere or graceful manner.

            Benedict Cumberbatch plays Allen Turing, the underappreciated genius who was hired by the British government to lead a secret team of code-breakers during World War II. Having grown up with few points of commonality among his peers, Turing was forced to stifle his ego and his anti-social disposition to successfully work with other scientists and math magicians as they worked tireless nights figuring out how to crack the ciphered messages delivered between the Nazi soldiers. Complicating the issue, he was also a repressed and closeted homosexual, working for a government that criminalized his natural desires and collaborating with a team of jealous Alfa-males who challenge his masculinity –the latter issue being a contrived plot device that underlines the manipulation of Graham Moore’s  ‘Oscar winning’ screenplay.

            Mathew Good does his best to justify his character’s hokey archetype as Turing’s caddish colleague and Kiera Knightly fits comfortably into the film’s Weinstein-brand austerity as Joan Clark, the only female code-breaker who finds a unique kin-ship with Cumberbatch’s effortless outsider portrayal. Peripheral performances from Mark Strong and Charles Dance as the team’s impatient military superiors are also a welcomed addition, but this admirable ensemble only masks the film’s achingly generic and narratively unambitious screenplay.

              There’s also the issue of how Turing’s hidden sexuality is sheepishly handled, the film often bumbles its way through very specific identity struggles. At different points the character’s secret is compared to Clark’s plight as an underappreciated woman and later he’s accused of being a Russian communist spy because he refuses to share certain aspects of his life with his co-workers. These comparisons, while not all together ineffective as a script device or an easy short hand for a straight audience, are somewhat misjudged when considering the deeper emotional complexities that the film doesn't even bother to approach.

              Artificiality isn't all together a bad thing in cinema and if judged as an overblown movie-of-the-week style dramatization of important war history “The Imitation Game” safely delivers as a soft-thriller. The movie’s moral questions about how and when to conceal highly sensitive war-time intelligence and the depiction of the race to break the Nazi’s Enigma machine has a filmic immediacy that lacks from the melodrama that dominates most of the screen-time. Nevertheless, the film’s rush to one-liners and lazy characterizations spoil whatever authenticity we are supposed to glean from the story’s message about intolerance and social progress.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015