Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a stellar performance in The Imitation Game. Although I’ve not seen him as Sherlock, after watching this movie, I want to.
This is more than just a great performance. This is a great movie—one that provides Cumberbatch the prime stage on which to shine. As the story about Alan Turing, the genius British logician and cryptologist who built the first computer (which cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II), the movie is riveting and engaging. The story is wonderfully paced, revealing the perfect amount of information with each changing scene, including those that flashback to Turing’s childhood.
Those flashbacks are revealing in many ways regarding how Turing related to his surroundings. I understood too well the difficulty with being too literal at times and the complications that can cause. (That led to some laughter by me alone during a few scenes, a bit awkward in the otherwise silence of the theater and other times coming just a wee too soon before the jokes had hit home with others. (To those at the movie around me, my apologies for that.)) Cumberbatch understands every layer and nuance of Turing’s difficulties interacting—due to Turing’s disinterest in small-talk niceties, due to his too literal nature to see the frivolity, due to his impatience when a task was called for, or due to his burying his secret so deeply, he was hiding from himself. But it’s in those nuanced expressions of incomprehension blended beautifully with impatience layered atop a strong base of a genius mind that make this character wonderfully complex—complexities that Cumberbatch captures.
As for hiding who he is, Cumberbatch also beautifully captures the angst in Turing’s secret and the feared horror that has been humanity’s past of the treatment of homosexuality. And it’s that hiding of his true self that provides a storyline paralleling the arc of the other. Sure, there’s the plot to crack Germany’s Enigma Code. But alongside that is Turing’s hidden homosexuality. I’ll say this: pay attention to the epilogue, shared in writing on the screen before the ending credits. The knot in my stomach of tightening nausea of how history has handled differences among people left me feeling disgrace for those in the past who had power and used that ignorant power in the manner that was done. I’m glad we’ve made progress. But the road continues on; I hope humanity continues moving forward.