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The term “prestige film” isn’t inherently a bad thing. The concept of a film made to appeal to a broad adult audience – not the worst thing imaginable. It’s just when those films condescend to the audience, downplay the realities, and present the material in as ham-fisted a manner as possible that it becomes an issue.
Behold, The Imitation Game, a film that gives the impression of having been rolled out of the Weinstein assembly line to achieve maximum Oscar impact. This doesn’t feel like a truly thought-out story, but like cherry-picked themes and moments cobbled together to give the impression that they’re saying something important.
This is the kind that gives the term “prestige film” a bad reputation. An awkward mixture of repressed homosexuality, brilliant man does good deed, spy film, and sensitive portrait of a misfit, The Imitation Game tries to hit as many boxes as possible without focusing in on the more interesting or historically accurate ones.
Alan Turing’s homosexuality was a major factor in his life, and the film merely plays lip service towards. He is but another in a long line of gay characters in film or television who is gay in name only, heaven forbid we ever see him engage in his sexuality. If you know even the slightest bit of truth about Turing and his life, you will see why this is offensive. This is truly a poorly handled major bit of historical fact and character development that is white-washed over.
Even more troublesome is the way that Turing’s brilliance and homosexuality are treated as symptoms of his being slightly autistic. The real Turing was not, nor was he treated so poorly by his real-life contemporaries. These story telling choices are just plain odd. The real man was fascinating enough, so why did they feel the need to change him so completely?
The lone saving grace of this film are the two main performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. However, neither one of them deserved award season consideration, as both of these performances have a general sense of being seen and done before by both actors. Cumberbatch in particular appears to be resting on a variation of Sherlock here, resting on a series of blinks and vocal tics instead of digging deeper into the truth. Knightley is solid, but her part is so underwritten, essentially playing Robin to Cumberbatch’s Batman.
Handsome looking, but unbelievably dull, The Imitation Game also traffics in moments that read as pure fiction. A long series of scenes in which these code breakers are deciding which groups of people get to live or die to try and hide information from the Germans reeks of Hollywood artifice. And no amount of lovely production design or period-accurate costumes can mask this. So here we have a film that infantilizes the main character’s homosexuality, commits obvious historical inaccuracies, and is an exercise in mass tedium (which is incidentally what I nicknamed the somehow Oscar nominated director, Morten Tyldum). Of course it got nominated a bunch during awards season, but thank god it (mostly) lost all of its races. Maybe even the Academy is getting tired of this particular strain of BBC-lite prestige bullshit.
