Oscar special : Benedict Cumberbatch looks great, acts better, but The Imitation Game disappoints

So along comes The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the scientist who helped break secret Nazi codes in World War II and helped the Allies defeat Germany. Turing was also responsible for creating the backbone for personal digital computing and artificial intelligence, and was also sentenced to chemical castration by the British government for being a homosexual. We’re introduced to a handsome Cumberbatch as the young and mildly cocky Turing who enlists in the MI6 as a code breaker. He has no experience in warfare nor in the art of interviewing. But he gets the job because he knows stuff that the general public doesn’t – that the Nazis use a special code called Enigma, which they use to coordinate naval attacks. Turing knows the British army needs him, and that he can do great things with his well-established research on artificial intelligence. He also knows that there is no human on the planet smart enough to crack the unbreakable Enigma code – so he comes up with the idea to design a code breaking machine to break the Nazi code machine. [caption id=“attachment_2050255” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] This is a great story, but it ends up to be a frustrating film because you see the Hollywood virus of simplification infect a director like Morten Tyldum, who so audaciously transcended the elements of formula in his native Norwegian film, Headhunters. While that movie could create characters that weren’t boringly black or white, The Imitation Game paints its characters in very broad strokes. We’re repeatedly told Turing is a great man and the Brits were utterly rubbish towards him, and the Nazis are horrible as well. Yet, none of those three things are explored in depth. We’re shown Turing’s machine that beat the Enigma – but no detail on how he went around building it. What does the machine exactly do? What is it made of? How long did it take to build? How exactly does it break the Enigma code? We know nothing. In one scene, Turing is struggling to fight bureaucrats who don’t believe in him. In the next, everyone’s rejoicing over the machine being built and working. The film is too scared to give you the full details of Turing’s life, like the fact that he was living in with a homeless man — a not-so-minor detail that is excised completely. His homosexuality is rendered in a ham-handed way, with jarring flashback scenes that keep appearing in dramatic plot points just before they culminate. So even when Cumberbatch is doing his best to move you, the sensitivity just doesn’t come across. The Imitation Game tries too hard in some places, and doesn’t try hard enough in others. If only the writer Graham Moore spent some more time fleshing out Turing’s life in a less Hollywoody, less Oscar-baity and more nuanced manner. There is a whole subplot featuring Kiera Knightley as Turing’s protegee who eventually becomes his fiancee, and the dynamics and complications of a woman marrying a gay man are never explored. Nor are there any concrete details on his life after the war, when Turing is believed to have been lonely and depressed, and forced to undergo chemical castration. Even his death is portrayed by white text rather than visuals. It becomes hard to pinpoint what exactly the film was trying to portray when everything it attempts waltzes by like a checklist of episodes. There’s also actors in the secondary cast, like Matthew Goode and Mark Strong, who enter and exit the frame without much to do. A film about an incredibly smart man designing a machine that changed the course of history is hard to dislike. There are a few things that The Imitation Game has going for itself, like Cumberbatch’s winning and sensitive performance, and the production design that renders the chilly atmosphere of England in the Forties. Plus, it’s a great story to tell. Unfortunately Hollywood manages to commit it’s usual mistake: The Imitation Game is too simplistic. It’s curious that three of the Hollywood films releasing this week have the same common strand of drawbacks – they’re all biopics that scrubbed clean to make their protagonists seem more sympathetic.