The Imitation Game.  See it.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to write a really learned critique, but it’s not happening.  Lots of others are going to do that anyway.  What you need to know is that this is one amazing film.  I went in expecting to like it.  I’m an Anglophile and a history geek and I’m gay.  I am absolutely THE target audience the filmmakers were shooting for.  I would have been surprised if I hadn’t liked it.  What surprised me was how much it affected me.  

Thank God I had a handkerchief.  It was needed.

I have seen a million movies about WWII and an equal number about plucky yet mismatched little groups who find a way to pull together and do “the big thing,” whatever that happens to be.  And I’ve seen plenty of gay-themed flicks.  There was nothing new thematically in The Imitation Game.  There wasn’t even that much that I didn’t know about the story.  Going in we all knew that Alan Turing and his team had broken the Enigma code and helped win the war and saved millions of lives by extension.

I try to avoid using expressions like “I was blown away,” but I will tell you I was swept up in The Imitation Game completely.  And when the plucky little group reached their breakthrough moment, I found tears streaming down my face.  I was all in.  Even writing about it now, I’m a little misty.

I’ve got to tip my hat to Graham Moore for a beautiful script and to the cast for using that script to rip my heart out.  Benedict Cumberbatch, whom I’d appreciated before this without being a big fan, was so terrific as Alan Turing.  It’s hard to be distant and arrogant and self assured and vulnerable at the same time.  Turing was both – totally sure of himself in his work and still a lost little boy in personal relations.  Kiera Knightly was better than I’ve ever seen her.  (I say that as a fan.)  And Mark Strong was terrific as the government guy who is a little to creepy and questionable to be considered a “good guy.”  Think a better-looking British Dick Cheney.  No don’t.  That will ruin it.

For me, a huge part of The Imitation Game’s power is the tragedy that goes with the triumph.  The story of overcoming an insurmountable obstacle is almost overshadowed by the waste that parallels it.  On the surface there’s the squandering of all those young lives in battle.  Beyond that, there is the continuing insanity of how we allow our prejudices to keep others from reaching their full potential and dismissing them when they do.

The Imitation Game reminds us what a short time ago it was that women weren’t fighting just for equal pay but for the chance to do anything outside the home besides secretarial work.  It reminds us that in the middle of the last century a man could lead a group to end a world war and save the lives of 14 million people and still be destroyed by the fact that he also had consensual sexual relations with other grown men.

And fact that there is no one in the film who isn’t white speaks to the reality that ethnic and racial minorities weren’t even on the radar in any meaningful way.  Who knows whether there was a black or Asian or Indian man or woman out there who was as brilliant as Turing who could have done the same thing if he or she had had the opportunities he did?

We all know there is no justification for any of these things aside from arrogance, stupidity and fear of the unknown.  And yet we are still struggling with the same foolishness today.

I hope we get it together someday.  In the meantime, see The Imitation Game and remember.