Review: Cumberbatch cracks Oscar's code in 'Imitation'

It's intriguingly contradictory that the man who cracked one of the most important codes in history was himself impenetrable.

British mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing deciphered the Enigma Code, and stopped the Nazis during World War II with the help of a half-dozen crossword puzzle enthusiasts. But his own psyche was almost as enigmatic as the code he sought to break.

Turing is credited with saving the lives of 14 million people and cutting the war's length by two years. He was repaid for his extraordinary service by being arrested in 1952 for gross indecency and chemically castrated because of his homosexuality, then illegal. He committed suicide two years later, at 41.

Despite these terribly sad facts, Norwegian director Morten Tyldum doesn't approach Turing's story as a tragedy in The Imitation Game (*** out of four; rated PG-13; opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles). Based on the biography by Andrew Hodges, Imitation illuminates Turing's brilliance in an engrossing and moving film that features a standout, Oscar-worthy performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Cambridge-educated math prodigy created a complex machine — a proto-computer — in 1939 that led to cracking the German's encryption device and to the victory of the Allied forces. When he realizes that Royal Navy Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) wants him off the program, Turing persuades Winston Churchill to put him in charge. Inexplicably, the film doesn't show how he accomplishes this feat. Instead, it wastes time on a dull scene in which Turing visits the parents of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), the only woman on the team.

It's choices like these, as well as glossing over the horrors of his final years, that keep the film from being great. It's well-crafted, solidly acted, with evocative production design and a convincing period feel. But it stops short of excellence.

The film relies a bit too heavily on a repeated movie anthem as a kind of explanatory mantra: "Sometimes it's the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine."

The story of Turing's noteworthy accomplishment is told compellingly in a fractured narrative style. Sharply written by Graham Moore, the film cuts gracefully between scenes of Turing's childhood (Alex Lawther as the young Turing), his wartime service and his life in Manchester at the time of his arrest. Newsreel-style footage of the war and a few re-enactments are interspersed effectively.

Turing changed the world. Sadly, he was done in by that same world, only a few years later.

Much is made about his not being "normal," in the sense that he came across as obsessive, arrogant, intensely driven, prickly and socially awkward.

But Cumberbatch never portrays Turing as a collection of quirks. He infuses the character with a complex blend of dignity, rigidity, fragility and heartbreaking sorrow.

The Imitation Game is a fascinating character study that's also a war drama with tense thriller elements and a decorous pedigree. It's Cumberbatch's nuanced, haunted performance, however, that leaves the most powerful impression.