Even 70 years after it ended, the Second World War continues to yield cinematic stories of valour and suspense that enthrall viewers. The war, of course, had many heroes, many of whom were honoured and celebrated in their lifetimes. Many of them saw frontline action, and are the more easily recognised for that.
But far more game-changing heroes abounded, far away from the warfront, whose efforts contributed just as significantly in ensuring Allied victory in the war against Nazism, but whose identities or war efforts haven’t sufficiently been acknowledged. The Imitation Game pays homage to Alan Turing, one of the less-known heroes, whose intervention, even by Winston Churchill’s acknowledgement, helped end the war two years sooner and saved millions of Allied lives.
Turing was a maladjusted mathematician, who led the British race to crack the German telecommunications code Enigma. It was virtually impossible for humans to unscramble the codes, since the Germans changed the settings at midnight every night, so Turing persuades MI6—and even secures Churchill’s sanction—to build a machine that stands a more realistic chance of cracking it. (That machine is widely acknowledged as the prototype of today’s computer.) Turing and his all-star team of men (and a sole woman, Joan Clarke) work on the top-secret mission, plodding on for months, battling mathematical egos and the weary impatience of military commanders ever ready to pull the plug.
That alone makes for a gripping tale, but there’s another, more personal narrative of Turing’s own eventual dishonour, in the years immediately after the war, for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality. Despite his game-changing war effort, Turing was disgraced by the criminality, and committed suicide in 1954. More than 50 years later, an Internet campaign persuaded the British government to 'pardon' Turing and offer an apology.
Turing’s tortured, many-layered character is brought vividly to life by Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role he was born to essay. (They are 17th cousins in real life, with family relations going back to the 14th century.) Every aspect of Turing’s personality— from his sneering sense of superiority to his maladroit, misanthropic, mathematical ‘misfitness’ to his wry, utterly British humour to, in the end, pathos-evoking breakdown is brilliantly channelled by Cumberbatch. The actor revealed later that he couldn’t stop crying in one of the final scenes because he had grown “incredibly fond of the character” who had suffered so much; it’s an emotion that audiences will readily empathise with. And Keira Knightley, playing Joan Clarke, brings much-needed feminine grace—and a touch of spark—to this war film. The scene in which she breathes fire at a bumbling Turning (when he plans to send her packing) crackles with emotional intensity.
All in all, a gripping narrative about a quirky character in the backdrop of a war that just keeps on giving stories to this day.
