Film Review: ‘The Imitation Game’ Starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Keira Knightley

Though he has been working steadily on the British stage and screen for well over a decade, Benedict Cumberbatch’s breakout as an international star has been quite a recent phenomenon for the actor thanks his much lauded performances in “Star Trek Into Darkness” as well as the hit series “Sherlock.”  

If his latest role as codebreaker Alan Turing is any indicator, Cumberbatch has fully arrived as one his generation’s best actors.  “Imitation Game,” which casts together an ensemble of some of Britain’s finest (Matthew Goode, Keira Knightley, Mark Strong, and Irish actor Allen Leech of “Downton Abbey” fame), was directed by Norwegian filmmaker Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore.  The film, distributed in the U.S. by the Weinstein Company, makes its stateside premier Friday, November 28.

Alan Turing, the British mathematician responsible for cracking Nazi codes during World War II alongside a team of some of his country’s most brilliant minds at Bletchley Park, played an integral part in the war ending when it did.  Without Turing’s exceptional code-cracking abilities, victory against the Nazis would arguably have taken years longer or proved impossible.  Turing’s involvement in WWII alone—not to mention his success in inventing the Turing machine, a precursor to the modern day computer—provides plenty of gripping material for a film script.  The man was much more than his resume of professional accomplishments, though, and when he was outed as homosexual in the early 1950s, the very country he had worked to protect turned against him, convicting Turing as a criminal and forcing him to undergo a form of chemical castration to avoid prison time.

“Imitation Game” does its best to cover the breadth of Turing’s story while maintaining a tight pace, but at times, this effort to condense huge events leaves one feeling that aspects of the man’s tumultuous life are glossed over.  Cumberbatch’s stirring portrayal of Turing’s loneliness, his difficulty connecting with those around him hearkening back to childhood torment (also memorably captured in a series of flashbacks), leaves one wanting to know more about the effects of his criminal conviction and isolation from the rest of society.  Graham Moore’s script infuses just the right amount of crackling, dry British humor into an obviously serious story.  Knightley, Goode, and Leech provide excellent support, playing energetically off one another and elevating the stakes of their task as codebreakers to pulse-racing heights. Ultimately though, “Imitation Game” is a vehicle for Cumberbatch’s talent, and could very well win him a Best Actor nod come Oscar season.