The Imitation Game

You don’t need to spend much time reading this blog to discover my dislike of biopics and docudramas. There are so many movies of this ilk made every year that I often feel like simply writing something cursory about each one like, “This is a standard biopic, and X actor or Y actress is excellent,” or “This is a sub-par docudrama, and X actor or Y actress doesn’t rise to the challenge,” and leave it at that. After all, especially with biopics that try to summarize an entire life story in two hours, these movies follow formulas far more stale than the basic templates of other well-worn genres, and the main reason we go to them is to see outstanding performances that often get nominated for major awards. True, we also go to get an oversimplified history lesson (and ideally to be inspired to learn more about the subject on our own), but rarely do we go expecting to see a great story well told.  However, over the past few decades I’ve observed a slight improvement in this type of picture. While many of my favorite genres, like the rom-com and the action thriller, have degraded into self-conscious exercises that practically apologize for following their specific narrative conventions, or meta-deconstructions that attempt to negate these formulas altogether, Hollywood biopics are actually getting slightly better as cinema begins its second century of existence.  It’s still rare to see a great biopic, but contemporary audiences’ familiarity and comfort with non-linear storytelling have enabled these movies to break down a real person’s life into narrative structures that follow a stream-of-consciousness logic rather than slavishly marching from one required story beat to the next, in the required order of a rigid blueprint. The shifting timelines and multiple story arcs of mainstream hits like Pulp Fiction, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Slumdog Millionaire, as well as television’s all-encompassing embrace of these fluid storytelling forms, has freed the biopic from its contrivances a tiny bit.

A prime example is The Imitation Game, which tells the story of British mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. One of the central figures responsible for cracking Germany's Enigma code during World War II, and a pioneer of computer science, Turing is fascinating not only for the part he played in the Allies victory over the Nazis, but because of his complex and anti-social personality. Probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, Turing alienated most of his peers, colleagues, and superiors for most of his life. The fact that he was much smarter then most people, and a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, made him all the more an outsider and an outlier. His inability to understand social cues, humor, and other typical human behaviors was the very thing that enabled his talent for deciphering codes. These attributes are also precisely what make him great fodder for a biopic. Hollywood loves real life stories about extraordinary people with significant physical or mental challenges as much as it loves stories about WWII victories, homosexual martyrs, and rebel underdogs triumphing over stodgy authority figures. Turing’s life has all these ingredients plus a romantic subplot with a brilliant, independent, headstrong woman whom contemporary audiences can easily identify with. True, Hollywood doesn’t love stories about scientific facts—too difficult to get complex concepts across in an entertainment medium—but the rest of Turing’s life seems tailor made for the full biopic treatment.

Director Morten Tyldum (who made the 2011 thriller Headhunters--Norway’s highest-grossing film of all time) and first-time screenwriter Graham Moore jump back and forth between three key time periods in Turing’s life to tell his story and convey the various shades of his character.  The main plotline is that of his wartime service, working with a team of scientists to break the Enigma code and developing an intriguing platonic romance with the only female member of his team, Joan Clarke. The picture frequently darts back to his early days at school to give us insight into what it was like to grow up with such an oddly functioning brain at a time when terms like Autism and Asperger syndrome were unheard of. The film also jumps forward in time to the premature conclusion of Turing’s life, to contextualize how such a major figure in Western history could be so little known during the years when his accomplishments should have been most celebrated. The triangulated narrative structure keeps us interested in this story, so that the quality of the movie does not rest alone on its excellent performances.

Benedict Cumberbatch finally gives a performance that lives up to his reputation as the modern-day Lawrence Oliver. As the new shining star of British stage, TV, and film, he is often lauded, and recurrently overrated, but not here. His idiosyncratic looks and off-kilter delivery of lines, which make his Sherlock Homes so intriguing, serve him even better as Turning. He deftly plays the man as both a deeply vulnerable misfit and a supremely confident leader.  Keira Knightley, the ubiquitous star of big British costume dramas and small American indies, is as frequently underrated and belittled as Cumberbatch is lionized. Here, she excels as Joan Clarke, Turing's closest ally, and the odd chemistry between these two fine actors is captivating. The filmmakers go out of their way to create numerous scenes that illustrate how aloof and unsociable Turing is and how the lovely, whip-smart Clarke is able to see past his external oddities and love the man for his mind and for the opportunities he gives her. The picture’s heightened depiction of facts, situations, and relationship dynamics risks tipping the characters into a clichéd exploitation of subject, but the actors ground the movie and steer it in the direction of effective melodrama. Indeed The Imitation Game plays far more effectively as melodrama than as dramatized history because less screen time is devoted to the complex details about how Turing and his team broke the code than is spent on Turing’s interactions with people. It is fortunate that the supporting cast is made up of actors the caliber of Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Rory Kinnear, and the always-welcome Charles Dance, because none of these roles is written as anything more than two-dimensional representations of the type of people Turing had to fight with or win over. Shallow characterizations can function well in melodrama, but leave us frustrated in historical docudramas.

For all the structural elegance in The Imitation Game and the strong performances, far too much of it remains plagued with the clichés and artificialities of the biopic genre. The picture is nearly derailed every time it introduces an underdeveloped subplot relating to one of Turing's collaborators. These scenes feel like red herrings, false mini-dramas shamelessly inserted to raise the film’s stakes. Similarly, too many redundant scenes show Turing’s behavior angering his coworkers. Practically every scene in the movie is heightened with excessive conflict that begins to feel contrived about halfway through. The prime example of where the film falls down is in its depiction of Turing’s biggest Enigma revelation. It comes to him in a sequence set at a bar, where aspects of his current dilemma, the longstanding issues that he’s struggled with all his life, and an everyday occurrence come together in a “eureka” moment. Even if there is a grain of truth to how this breakthrough is depicted, it feels false because the film hasn’t taken the time to show us the characters in uncharged moments. Prior to this pivotal set piece, every scene features a confrontation or the defusing of a conflict, so when we suddenly see the team relaxing we know something big is going to happen because we’ve never been shown a scene of relaxation before, and even Cumberbatch can’t make this key moment of discovery feel authentic.

The movie also features several occurrences of characters patently stating the film’s themes in flowery exchanges and speeches. The best actors in the world can’t make on-the-nose dialogue like this work credibly in a biopic context, which is another reason why the picture plays better when viewed as romantic historical melodrama than as a depiction of history. We can get swept up in how the two lead characters inventively navigate their way through the sexist and homophobic environment they live in, more than we can the buy into the film’s portrayal of wartime code breaking. Good, old-fashioned melodrama flourishes in the heightened reality of a period milieu such as the one created for this movie. And Cumberbatch and Knightley are so vibrant, and their characters are so intriguing, that when the film focuses on them, it works.