The Imitation Game, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T., Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kiera Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Stone, Charles Dance, Alan Leech, Tuppence Middleton, Rory Kinnear, Steven Waddington, Tom Goodman Hill, Matthew Beard, James Northcote, Alex Lawther, Jack Bannon.

 

Alan Turing was a hero of the British war effort in World War Two. His name is now lauded, researched and cheered for his significant part in saving many millions of lives during the darkest of days that shrouded Europe in a blanket of hate. It was due to fear and mistrust though that eventually saw the Professor take his own life in the cruellest of circumstances under a decade later.

To capture the image of the man is an impossibility, not everything can ever be recorded, not every deed sung but in the latest of a long line of British cinematic releases, The Imitation Game does bring the life of the man who built the machine that helped defeat the Nazis strikingly to life and it is a film that will have audiences gripped from start to finish.

The cast was impressive and all played the parts of history well. Keira Knightly as Joan Clarke was charming, Matthew Goode once more showing a long held prowess over celluloid, Mark Stone, Charles Dance and Rory Kinnear are on magnificent form and Alan Leech as supposed ‘Fifth Man’ in the Guy Burgess sensation, John Cairncross, proving there is life beyond Downton Abbey. It is though to Benedict Cumberbatch that eyes must and inevitably do turn for his portrayal of Alan Turing. It is a masterclass of artistic endeavour and one that in the coming months might only be challenged by Eddie Redmayne as he takes on another hero of British academia as Stephen Hawking.

When a film can deliver not just enjoyment in the narrative but also cause you to feel the burning shame of anger in the way that someone was treated for being considered different, then the film delivers on every possible count. The way that many men and women who have been treated by society and more sickeningly by Government in such a fashion, some heroes, others just law abiding citizens never going out to cause harm but who just happened to be gay, many decades after the law was changed still sticks in the throat like a bullet lodged in the craw.

Alan Turing was the finest type of hero, unassuming, dedicated to the cause, a man who didn’t seek the limelight and who in his heart realised that the likes of Arthur “Bomber Harris”, Guy Gibson, Field Marshall Montgomery, Douglas Bader and Winston Churchill would always be more readily thanked in public than he, or his team at Bletchley Park, would ever be.

The Imitation game doesn’t seek to reproduce an era or impersonate grotesquely the lives of those that shortened World War Two by belittling it or changing facts to suit the imagination of the writer or the screenplay for an audience. Like Mathematics, the facts are stated and the background work is left to fathom out. Like a puzzle the split timings are a conundrum which is to be revelled in and three distinct eras of Alan Turing’s life, from young school boy, to the man who solved the Devil’s handiwork and to the months before he could bear no more of the state sanctioned punishment handed down to him, are there to be seen as a warning to those who seek to impose their vision of normality that the truth of a person’s life work will always shine through.

The Imitation game is a true classic in the making, a well deserved salute to the men and women of Bletchley Park and to one of the finest minds in British history.

Ian D. Hall