“THE IMITATION GAME”: Doing what cannot be imagined

Benedict Cumberbatch (center) as Alan Touring; Keira Knightly at left

But he is brilliant.  “I like solving problems,” he tells a dubious Denniston. “And Enigma is the most difficult puzzle in the world.”

The Brits have captured an Enigma Machine, a typewriter-like contraption into which coded gobbledygook is entered; it emerges in coherent German.

Each day the German machines are set to one of 159 million million possible codes. Turing and the other brainiacs must identify that day’s code within 24 hours.  After that they’ll have to start again from scratch.

Screenwriter Graham Moore (adapting Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing) tells the tale by jumping among three different periods in Turing’s life.

In the main story set in the top secret enclave of Bletchley Park,  Turing alienates his colleagues by working alone (“I’m afraid these men will only slow me down”). He convinces the spy in charge of the project (Mark Strong) to finance the building of a huge machine (a marvelous wall of spinning rotors and thick red cables) that will go through the possible Enigma settings with far more speed than the human mind.

He brings into the group a woman, a mathematician/linguist (Keira Knightley) who defies rampant sexism to make a contribution. At one point Turning even proposes marriage  in order to keep her involved in the project.

And throughout he faces the possibility of a sudden shutdown of his efforts by uncomprehending and narrow-minded leaders.

In flashbacks set in the 1920s young Turing (Alex Lawther) suffers the torments of a British boarding school, finding relief only in his friendship with Christopher (Jack Bannon), a fellow student who introduces him to cryptography and with whom young Turing is falling in love. (He calls the computer he’s building at Bletchley Park “Christopher.”)

Framing both of these is a segment set in 1953 near the end of Turing’s life.  His Manchester apartment has been burglarized and a police detective (Rory Kinnear) finds something’s fishy about this weirdo professor.  Thinking he might be dealing with a Soviet spy, the cop looks into Turing’s war record; his suspicions are only heightened when he finds that the suspect’s history has been wiped clean.

But the investigation will reveal Turing’s homosexuality, a crime punishable by imprisonment or “chemical castration.”

What’s really astonishing about Cumberbach’s work is how he reveals the inner life of a man painfully uncomfortable with the very idea of emotional expression.

It should be easier for us to identify with any of his colleagues (among them Matthew Goode and “Downton Abby’s” Allen Leach), but there’s never a moment when Cumberbach doesn’t dominate. He has an uncanny knack of giving us just enough to intimate what’s going on inside that marvelous head.

In a year of terrific performances by leading men, Cumberbatch gets my vote for top honors.

And “The Imitation Game” does a fine job of explaining the contribution of British thinkers who, without every handling a weapon, shaved two years off the war and saved and estimated 14 million lives.

The main mind behind that triumph, the movie maintains, was offputting Alan Turing.

As one colleague observes, “The world is a better place precisely because he isn’t normal.”

| Robert W. Butler