The Imitation Game.

Lighter, Jonathan E.

You might not think so to look at it, but director Morten Tyldum's Imitation Game (2014) is largely a handsome melodrama in defense of a straw man. Benedict Cumberbatch--not everyone's favorite actor--is unforgettable here in the role of that straw man, a highly sentimentalized version of the Cambridge mathematician and computer visionary Alan Turing. According to the meticulous biography on which the film is based, Alan Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), the real Turing resembled his screen counterpart only slightly in code breaking achievements and almost not at all in personality. The customary end-credit disclaimer that the characters do not represent real individuals is accompanied by another, advising anyone reading the tiny print that The Imitation Game is "not factually reliable."

What is both true and on screen, however, is that the rather shy and eccentric Turing was a genius when it came to code breaking and mechanical computation, that his best friend (and briefly his fiancee) at the U.K. Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park was a mathematician named Joan Clarke, and that, in 1940, Turing had a hand in breaking the most advanced version of the German Enigma code, which encrypted German military and naval communications. Twelve years later Turing was convicted of committing a homosexual act, sentenced, in lieu of prison, to over a year of estrogen treatments to eliminate desire, and died, apparently a suicide, in 1954. It is also true that crossword puzzles were used to test the abilities of potential code breakers, and that a Soviet agent, John Cairncross, worked at Bletchley. (It is not true that Turing was ever suspected of treason, though Tyldum and scriptwriter Graham Moore have him investigated twice.) The movie correctly cites carelessness in German transmissions as a key factor in breaking the code but downplays its crucial role. Barely alluded to is that the Poles had broken a simpler version of Enigma in 1932 and in 1939 had shared their knowhow with both London and Paris. But in the popular arts, as we know, the unshakable resolve of the hero usually trumps the workings of chance and the achievements of other people.

But enough of quibbling. As an absorbing entertainment rather than a source of information about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game is excellent. But more interesting are its two fundamental themes. The first is Turing's struggle to get his colleagues, alienated by his (exaggeratedly) insufferable personality, to see the Enigma problem his way. Because he's an arrogantly impatient man with social skills at zero, no one but Joan (Keira Knightley) can really stand him until his mysterious calculating machine cracks Enigma. As a final title-screen makes clear, the film's main intention is to condemn the British law (repealed decades ago) that criminalized homosexual acts, and the bigotry that led the Crown to prosecute and punish even a hero like Turing. The film's second theme, however, and it is made almost inadvertently, may be of more lasting significance: what precisely are the role and responsibilities of intelligence agencies in wartime? Or, nowadays, in peacetime as well?

The Codebreaker's Dilemma had long been known to Turing's superiors of the Secret Intelligence Service ("MI6"), but it gained urgency as soon as Enigma was broken. The dilemma is this: How freely can decrypted military intelligence be put to use without revealing that the code has been cracked and prompting the enemy in turn to devise one that is even more intractable?

In The Imitation Game that dilemma seems to have occurred to no one but Turing who, with breathless minutes to spare, convinces his colleagues not to send planes to save an Atlantic convoy which, incredibly and like the lone Lusitania in 1915, has "hundreds" of "women and children" on board. A sudden aerial ambush against a wolfpack of U-boats would make further Enigma decryptions dangerous or impossible to use to "win the war," as Turing puts it. And the same scene has Turing and the boffins deciding for the future just how much detail will be safe to tell even their own chief. The Imitation Game takes it as obvious that a handful of top mathematicians are best qualified to determine military operations in wartime, and that it's fine for them to conspire, as a hero band, to keep their own government in the dark. (The name Edward Snowden comes to mind, if only obliquely.) The scene raises important questions, however: Whose lives shall we sacrifice through inaction, and whose shall we save? And who should be "we," and why?

Turing sums up in a voiceover:

    People talk about the war as this epic battle between
   civilizations. Good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. Armies of
   millions bleeding into the mud, fleets of ships that weighed down
   the oceans, packs of airplanes that dropped bombs until they
   blotted out the sun itself. But it wasn't. 

Well, of course it was, but the movie reminds us that World War II was more than that. It says that the outcome was largely decided, not by the blood, sweat, and tears of millions, but by office-bound analysts and shadowy teams of specialists trying to outwit each other in the dark. Clausewitz recognized the enormous role of chance and error on the battlefield. In battle, however, innumerable chances work unpredictably on each other; but in a war of analysts, the chances may seem to be fewer but each one (like the carelessness of German cryptographers) has greater consequences than in Clausewitz's century. Cracking Enigma may have shortened the war by two or more years and saved, according to The Imitation Game, "fourteen million lives." But what if the breaks had gone the other way? What if, as in Iraq in 2003, the intelligence to be analyzed is partly bogus and largely mishandled?

The whirring calculating machine to which the cinema Turing devotes himself without human stint, and which is designed to analyze "159 million million million" letter equivalences and decoy combinations, is touchingly named "Christopher," in covert honor of Turing's one friend, his schoolboy crush, who once gave him a book on secret codes. The real Turing, however, said by Hodges to have been well liked at Bletchley and far more of a team player than in the film, confidently called his somewhat less magical machine "Victory."