Beautiful acting, interesting story, a great Benedict, I wish I wished to see it again but I don’t, I can’t, it hurts. It’s so utterly unbelievable that in 1951 England would ruin a man simply because he liked men instead of women. How was that any of the f-ing Government’s business? That’s sick.
Benedict Cumberbatch was amazing as Alan Turing, though, absolutely brilliant.
The film: (the title refers to one of Turing's thesis or something, if a machine can think like a man or not, how it can imitate humans or something like that)
It goes back and forth from 1951, 1939 and something like 1928, I think, not sure about the year he was in school. Anyway, the present is 1951, when he refuses to admit to the police that he’s been robbed; he acts very arrogantly and offensive and a detective finds it suspicious, becomes curious thinking he might be a spy or maybe hiding some big secret, and starts investigating him. When he’s brought in, Turing tells him his story.
In 1939 he joined a secret group of people under Commander Denniston (Charles Dance). He was 27 years old, and a genius. He didn’t know a word of German, but he loved solving puzzles and Enigma was the most difficult mystery of the era. He thought he would work alone at first, but instead he is put into a group of four or five people, I’m not sure. He doesn’t know how to work with people, and nobody likes him.
We see also flashbacks of his time at school, I think in 1928, where he was bullied because he was different (they show a scene when he separated all his food in the plate, a very classic OCD scene in movies, and as it always happens in movies the kid got bullied because of it. I never understood why that is, what do people care if he likes to eat his food separately? He wasn’t touching other kid’s food, just his own! Anyway, he was bullied because he was different and learned how people liked violence, but he also found a friend, one kid, Christopher, who helped him and spent time with him and told him that he would do great things and also introduced him to cryptography… but it didn’t last very long because after a break he didn’t come back to school, and he was told that he had died, that he had been sick for a while and died during the break.
Remembering his years in school Alan says that people like violence because it feels good… but I say that violence doesn’t feel good if you’re not a pathetic shadow of a man who needs it to feel superior in the only way he can.
In 1939 Alan and the others are told that they had only a few hours to decrypt the messages, because the next day the code would be different and they would have to start from scratch. Alan wants to build a machine to do it for them, because there are millions of combinations possible, but the other men are against him, and his machine would cost a lot. Denniston doesn’t like him either and says no, but Alan writes to Churchill himself. We don’t know what he wrote but the result was that he was put in charge. As soon as that was established, he fired two of those men. Now understaffed, he published a crossword-puzzle on a paper saying that whoever can finish it in less than ten minutes will have a job opportunity! Many men report for a final exam, plus a girl, Joan Clark (Keira Knightley). It was so annoying when the man at the door kept saying the secretaries are upstairs, and even asked her if she did it by herself or if she was helped… stupid man.
Alan lets her take the test, saying them that they have six minutes but saying to a man that he himself needs 8. She finished in five and a half. Hired. But then she didn’t show up for work, so he went to her house to talk to her. Basically her parents wouldn’t allow it because she was an unmarried girl, and it was not a decent thing to work alone with men, so he told her (because her parents were listening) that she would work with girls, and live with girls, so they let her go. She did too, but Alan could talk to her during breaks and also sneak into her room at night if he needed to discuss anything. He wants everyone to work on his machine, and Joan explains to him that they won’t help him if they don’t like him, (so he brings them apples and tells a joke, also explaining what Joan said :-p ). They start understanding him a bit, accepting him a bit, and they all work together. They build a big machine and finally test it, but it is still too slow. Too many possibilities even for it (Alan calls the machine Christopher … ) and it keeps working for hours but never stops in time. At this point Denniston breaks in and switches it off by force, and also fire him. Surprisingly, Hugh (Matthew Goode) defends him and his machine, saying he’ll go away too if Alan is fired, then John (Allen Leech) says the same, and then the others follow. At this point Denniston must yield so they can continue working on it.
Suddenly Joan says that her parents want her home, because she’s already 25 and still single, but Alan doesn’t want to lose her so he tells her that the logical thing to do is to get married, so she’ll be able to stay. They get engaged. Alan confesses to John that he’s homosexual, and John tells him to keep it a secret, not tell anyone, not even Joan. By chance, talking with Hugh and a friend of Joan, he has an idea. There are some words that are always the same, they are like fixed points, so the variables are much less, and now the machine works much faster and they are finally able to break the code, and use the enigma machine to decrypt the messages. They find that a civilian ship will be attacked soon, with Peter’s brother on it, but Alan stops them from interfering. He says they must let it be attacked, or the Germans will understand that they did it. Peter never forgave him, I guess.
Alan and Joan met with the MI6 guy explaining that they’ll use statistics to decide which messages are more important to win the war, and he’ll have to come up with a cover story for how they came to know about them. One day Alan finds him in his house: he lies to him saying that Joan has been arrested for being a spy, and Alan tells him that he knows that the (Soviet, not German) spy is John (even after John told him that if he told his secret he would reveal his own), but surprise surprise the MI6 guy (what was his name?!? can’t remember :-/) tells him he always knew, even before they started working together. Alan is afraid for Joan and tells her to go away but she doesn’t want to leave her job and him, so he confesses to be gay and she told him that she suspected it but also that it didn’t matter, not to her, because they do care for each other and understand each other and like each other’s company… but he’s so afraid for her that he tells her he never cared for her :-(
They win the war with Alan’s project called Ultra, and they are told that they need to burn everything and keep the secret and never see each other again.
In 1951, the cops that keep poking around into Alan’s business follow him and learn from a man that Alan is gay, so they arrest him. The detective is upset, that’s not what he wanted, so he talks with him before they take him away, and Alan tells him his story, asking him what he think he is, a hero or a monster, but he can’t tell, of course.
Being gay is against the law - unbelievable what men do, thinking they’re big important men they made laws to get people like Turing and Wilde in prison :-/ - so he’s convicted and given a choice: two years (I think) in prison or drugs. Joan comes back to him,now engaged and about to have a normal life, telling him that she would have testified, that she wanted to help him, but he says there was nothing she could do, and that he couldn’t bear the idea of being separated from Christopher - :-‘( - and therefore that he had already started taking the drugs, and it’s so sad to see not only his hands shaking, but his difficulty in doing a simple crosswords in the paper.
Joan is touched as well, and tries to comfort him by telling him how he saved millions of lives by winning the war, and how he could do it because he was different.
The film ends there, but there are written words that explain how Alan killed himself after a year of those drugs, only 41 years old, and also how thousands of men were convicted by law for being gay, and that very recently the Queen pardoned him (wow, he can spend it now.. but I guess it’s somehow an important gesture anyway).
There wasn’t really any need but it also reads that the Turing Machine is what we now call computer.
I knew about Turing being the one that broke the Enigma code, but that’s about all I knew about him. I heard from someone or read somewhere, I can’t remember, that Knightley was not plain enough to be like the real Joan, but watching the film I appreciated this. I’m not a big Knightley fan, but here she was good, appropriate, and I liked the fact that she was a pretty girl, but was valued for being intelligent.
Best thing of all was Benedict, he was very very good, so so touching, the ending broke my heart.
ITA the imitation game
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