Some
time ago I reviewed a novel called The Holmes Affair, by Graham Moore. I was not impressed by Moore’s effort, and at
the end of the review expressed my concern that he had written a speculative
script about Alan Turing called The
Imitation Game which, on the evidence of The Holmes Affair, in particular his inability to convey the nuances of
English life, would be as authentic about Turing as the 2000 film U-571 was about the capture of an Enigma
cipher machine (i.e. not at all). Moore sold his Imitation Game script to Warner Bros for a seven-figure sum, and
Leo DiCaprio was pencilled in as the lead.
That bizarre piece of miscasting has been rectified, with Benedict
Cumberbatch now set to play Turing, and Keira Knightley as his, well, his love
interest. Norwegian director Morten
Tyldum, an odd choice it would seem judging by his CV, is set to direct.
Based
on other roles Cumberbatch has played – Stephen Hawking, William Pitt the
Younger, Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Hooker etc – he should have no trouble making
Turing a believable, and sympathetic, character. But that still leaves the script, and the
suspicion that Moore just isn’t the man to trust with a convincing depiction of
England in the 1940s and 50s, what it was like to be a homosexual at that time
in general, and what it was like to be Alan Turing in particular.
My
fears were re-aroused by an article in the Sunday
Times, 23 June 2013, written by the paper’s arts editor, Richard Brooks (‘Enigma
of Keira as Code Breaker’s Lover’). According
to the piece, Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges has attacked the script “for
exaggerating a love affair and making a fictional connection to a notorious
spy.” The script was supposed to be based
on Hodges book Alan Turing: The Enigma,
but given Hodges’ comments, the word ‘loosely’ should be added. The probability increases that my initial
misgivings are not going to be allayed.
The
two main criticisms Hodges makes are that the filmmakers have exaggerated the strength
of the relationship Turing had with Joan Clarke, his Bletchley Park colleague
and briefly his fiancée, than is warranted by the facts; and that they have
invented a relationship with another Bletchley employee, intelligence officer
John Cairncross, later exposed as the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring. There is no evidence that Turing even knew
Cairncross because Bletchley projects were rigidly compartmentalised and Hodges
argues that Cairncross has been included in the script merely “to make it more
like a thriller”: perhaps a bit like the 2001 film Enigma.
What
about Turing as a man who spent a lot of time at his desk? Hodges’ allegation is that the script fails
by “showing virtually nothing of Turing’s extraordinary skills as a scientist
and computer designer.” I suppose you
could just shrug and say, “Hell, that’s Hollywood,” but surely Turing deserves
better. With much the same thought, Hodges
wrote to Moore, whom Brooks correctly refers to as “a feature movie novice”, with
these worries. All he got back, he says,
was an assurance that Turing would be shown doing marathon running and
interacting a bit more with colleagues: “This would make him less wimpish and
nerdish,” Hodges concludes. Let’s hope
he’s making some decent money out of the process of being disillusioned.
So
what did the film’s producer Teddy Schwarzmann, speaking from New York, have to
say to Brooks about these charges? Firstly,
the film is “a drama not a piece of entertainment.” Say that again Teddy, it’s not going to be
entertaining? Presumably he only means
it’s not going to look like a Michael Bay film, for which we should definitely be
grateful. Then Teddy says, “We don’t
want to fictionalise events but there are some creative liberties”, which I
think means they are going to fictionalise events. Perhaps sensing a little scepticism emanating
from the other end of his phone line, he continues: “When we come over [to
England], we are also going to get in touch with some other experts on that
period. We know how very important Turing
is to you over there.” That is good to
know, if somewhat patronising, though the experts he has in mind will probably
be there to make sure the telephones are of the right period rather than to
tell Teddy that the script is nonsense if that turns out to be the case.
Hugh
Whitemore’s superb 1986 play Breaking the
Code didn’t need to make Turing’s story into a thriller, or distort him out
of recognition. It focuses on Turing in
a quiet and persuasive way, and gives the character based on Joan Clarke just
the right emphasis in his life. It would
be nice if Moore could use it as a model, but it is unlikely at this late stage;
Schwarzmann told Brooks that “we start filming in the UK very soon.” If Hodges is correct in claiming that the
producers are trying to move into thriller territory, then they will be open to
the charge of a disrespectful distortion of Turing’s life in the pursuit
of boffo box office.
It
is a puzzle why Cumberbatch would want to have anything to do with this. Perhaps in his enthusiasm to inhabit another
interesting character he has overlooked any deficiencies he saw in the script. Or perhaps he thought he could exert some
leverage to improve it. Unfortunately it
looks like the problems run too deep, a matter of vision rather than emphasis,
and will not be improvable by a quick rewrite.
Given the roles Cumberbatch has played in the past, I’m sure his Turing will
be great, but the danger is that his performance will be a jewel in a dung heap.
Update:
18 December 2014
Having
now seen the film, I can safely say that it bears no relationship to a dung heap
whatsoever. It must have helped that
Warner Bros dropped out when DiCaprio lost interest, and after falling into the
hands of the Weinstein Company The
Imitation Game is a workmanlike if rather stolid treatment of Turing shown
in three time periods: school at Sherborne (an outstanding performance by Alex Lawther
looking much younger than his years), his time at Bletchley Park, which is the
heart of the film, and the last wretched period of his life in Manchester.
Benedict
Cumberbatch of course shines even though, or should that be because, he plays
Turing as being some way along the autism spectrum. The film has received a fair amount of
criticism for its inaccuracies and distortions, but somebody as complex –
downright cerebral – as Turing has to
be translated into an audience-friendly format, so far-reaching simplification
of the facts is to be expected, and some spurious tension injected to keep it
all ticking along. It doesn’t always
come off if the viewer has some knowledge of the subject, and the sub-Frankenstein
motif, Turing trying to recreate his lost love Christopher Morcom as a machine
intelligence, seems particularly misplaced.
Reservations
about massaging history aside, it’s not a terrible effort overall, and better
than advance word suggested. Which leads
one to suspect that while Graham Moore is credited as sole author of the
screenplay (and executive producer), other hands were involved in its
development as it is not the hash that one might have expected on the strength
of The Holmes Affair. Andrew Hodges’ book is also prominent in the
credits (with that all-important caveat ‘based on’ to let the film off the hook
of scholarly accuracy).
So
in hindsight, was Hodges mollified by the way his very chunky biography was
adapted into a crowd-pleasing movie? I
thought not on 17 August 2014 when my wife and I heard him give a dreadfully
poor rehashing of his thirty-year old book at Bletchley Park in which he
fidgeted constantly as he spoke and conducted a losing battle with PowerPoint.
(Fortunately we had attended a lecture given by James Grime at Cambridge’s
Centre for Mathematical Sciences the previous month, ‘Alan Turing and the
Enigma Machine’, which not only lucidly explained Turing’s life and work, with
brilliant AV support, but included a demonstration of the Enigma machine owned
by Simon Singh.)
James Grime and Simon Singh's Enigma cipher machine |
During
the question and answer session that followed Hodges’ turgid presentation my
wife asked him for his opinion on the forthcoming film, bearing in mind what he
had said in the Sunday Times. He was dismissive of the question and declined
to be drawn, flatly refusing to offer a view and blandly stating that we should
wait and see after it was released. When she politely asked again, dissatisfied by
his evasiveness, he just blanked her, an astonishing act of discourtesy. I can see his point though. He has made a lot of money out of the film,
both from rights and selling more copies of his book, freshly reissued only two
years after the last one, the 2012 ‘Centenary Edition’, with yet another new
preface slapped on to freshen it up, so it is understandable that having bitten
the hand that fed him once, he was loath to do it again. But the fact that he could not bring himself
to say nice things about the film implied that he had not changed his views,
only learned discretion.
From
the finished film it is clear that Hodges’ concerns were partially misplaced. Keira Knightley was certainly present but
Joan Clarke’s relationship with Turing was not exaggerated, nor was Turing’s
homosexuality downplayed, and while Cairncross is still there to give proceedings
a little zest, it would take more than that to make The Imitation Game resemble a thriller. The scene where Turing discovers that
Cairncross is a spy and Cairncross immediately blackmails him into silence by
threatening to expose his homosexuality has legitimately created some upset as
it suggests that Turing would have colluded in treason, but Turing does
eventually tell Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, only to discover that British
Intelligence knows about Cairncross already, so his initial reticence doesn’t
really matter.
As
to Hodges accusation that the script showed ‘virtually nothing of
Turing’s extraordinary skills as a scientist and computer designer’, I think it
is fair to say that Cumberbatch did convey Turing’s remarkable abilities as
best he could within a script that had to appeal to a mass audience, while
unfortunately being guilty of straying into clichéd mad boffin territory that
has to combine a trade-off of unusual intellectual talent with marked personality
defects. Finally, Hodges said in the Sunday Times that when he wrote to Moore
he was told that we would see Turing running marathons and interacting with
colleagues, which would ‘make him less wimpish and nerdish.’ We see Turing run
a couple of times, though just around fields, and of course he interacts with
colleagues, the initial friction with them and their growing respect and
support being a key development of the plot, so he certainly isn’t wimpish. But nerdish?
Of course he is: He’s Alan
Turing!
Contrary
to producer Teddy Schwarzmann’s preposterous claim that the film would be ‘a
drama not a piece of entertainment’, it is entertaining if not always
particularly dramatic. It’s not the
disgrace that Hodges and I both feared it would be from Moore’s novel and the
early drafts of the screenplay that Hodges saw, even if it’s not quite the
tribute that Turing deserves either.
Against the odds Cumberbatch has I think adequately conveyed the
brilliance and the tragedy of Turing’s character. The flaws that exist lie firmly with the
script, which is guilty of failing to trust the audience’s intelligence.
Update:
24 February 2015
It
would seem that my reservations about Graham Moore’s script were not shared by
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the awards ceremony held on
Sunday, 22 February 2015. To my surprise,
far from considering it flawed they thought highly enough of Moore’s work to
award it the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
The predictions beforehand certainly did not deem it a clear
front-runner and its success may have had something to do with the vigour of
the Weinstein promotional campaign, after The
Imitation Game was overshadowed by The
Theory of Everything at the BAFTAs, than with any inherent virtues of the
script itself.
Still, Moore gave a heartfelt acceptance speech which was a big hit, and he came over as genuinely nice. I think he was lucky as there may have been some horse-trading, giving The Imitation Game the best adapted screenplay award as consolation for director Morten Tyldum losing to Alejandro González Iñárritu, and of course Benedict Cumberbatch losing out to Eddie Redmayne in the best actor category. It will be interesting to see how Moore’s career develops; after this success he may want to steer clear of novels in favour of screenplays, which will be no bad thing.
Still, Moore gave a heartfelt acceptance speech which was a big hit, and he came over as genuinely nice. I think he was lucky as there may have been some horse-trading, giving The Imitation Game the best adapted screenplay award as consolation for director Morten Tyldum losing to Alejandro González Iñárritu, and of course Benedict Cumberbatch losing out to Eddie Redmayne in the best actor category. It will be interesting to see how Moore’s career develops; after this success he may want to steer clear of novels in favour of screenplays, which will be no bad thing.