THE IMITATION GAME

There was a time when Leonardo DiCaprio was considered for the role of Alan Turing, the cryptographer who cracked the Enigma code. I’m sure he’d have been very good but – as good as Benedict Cumberbatch? I rather doubt it. Cumberbatch gives an extraordinary performance as this ‘odd duck’, as Turing’s mother called him – a man who nowadays would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. He has no social graces or humour, no patience with people less clever than himself; he is self-confident to the point of arrogance, gay and a genius.

These are not easy qualities to portray but Cumberbatch does it superbly, conjuring up a remote but nevertheless likeable figure whose mind is always at work. If he has ever been better than this I must have missed it.

The film, directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, shifts between 1952 when Turing was arrested for ‘gross indecency’ and grilled by detective Rory Kinnear, Turing’s unhappy schooldays at Sherborne and his wartime work on the Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

There he invents and builds, at great cost, a proto-computer even cleverer than the apparently inscrutable Enigma, thus shortening the war by two years and saving millions of lives. Now we know, going in, that Turing did these things but the film develops like a nailbiting thriller as we watch the race against time and the opposition Turing faces from his gifted but bewildered colleagues.

At first none of them likes or understands this strange loner and Bletchley’s commanding officer (a splendidly hostile and supercilious Charles Dance) positively dislikes and distrusts him. At one point he even suspects Turing of being a Russian mole (there was one at Bletchley) and threatens to halt work on ‘Christopher’, the machine Turing is creating and which he names after a boy he loved at school.

This is great stuff, beautifully played throughout. Cumberbatch is supported by powerful performances from such as Kinnear, Matthew Goode, as Turing’s number two, Mark Strong as a manipulative MI6 officer and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, the only woman on the team. Clarke, who was almost as clever as Turing, becomes his confidante, his constant supporter and briefly his fiancée, a woman whom he loved intellectually but not physically.

It’s a story of a great and, for many years, unsung triumph but it ends inevitably on a bitter note with Turing, found guilty of that ‘gross indecency’, choosing chemical castration rather than prison and committing suicide.

Some have criticised the film for not being more explicit about his homosexuality but why should it? We know he’s gay – he tells us so, he tells a male colleague, he tells Clarke. Do we really need to see him at it?

Last year Turing, who was never given any honours but should have been showered with them, was granted a royal pardon for having been gay. Wherever he is now I imagine he must be murmuring, ‘Oh, thanks a bunch.’