The Imitation Game has had a constant presence amongst the nominees of the numerous awards this awards season but to me it seems as if its been largely ignored in favour of its competition. If you had asked me a year and a half ago I would have said this film would be the front runner for all the best picture awards because it is a biopic (which awards ceremonies love) of Alan Turing, an eccentric but highly troubled man and it featured a very talented cast. I’ve watched the movie twice now and twice I’ve been underwhelmed. When the film was green lit and the cast was being put together I did some of my own research and the man seems extraordinary and I was shocked I’d never heard of him before, he’d created the algorithm that I was using to search him and I knew nothing about him! His story was a rich one which would usually be prime for awards gold but The Imitation Game falls flat and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
Think back to a few months ago when the film premiered at TIFF it garnered near universal praise but there was one criticism that critics kept picking at, the lack of sex scenes for Turing. You see Turing was a war hero who wasn’t celebrated in his lifetime and ended up being convicted because he was a homosexual and his sentence was to be dosed with a substance that led to chemical castration. Critics were discussing the lack of gay sex scenes in the film and pointing out that it made the film less realistic, and although I hadn’t seen the film at the time I wasn’t inclined to side with the critics. I’m not a fan of featuring sex within a film just for the sake of it and in all honesty I didn’t see the point, you wouldn’t expect to see a heterosexual couple constantly in compromising positions in a biopic if theres no specific reason behind it so why would you see it here? Because the characters gay? Why should that character be treated any differently?
After watching the film a couple of times now and thinking about it I do find myself siding more towards the critics point of view. The main relationship that we see develop in The Imitation Game was between Turing and Joan Clarke who were colleagues that became firm friends. They were even engaged at one point, in part to stop Joan from getting married off in a time when a woman’s place was to be at home rather than in a male dominated work environment and also to hide Alan’s sexuality. There was so much emphasis on the importance of this relationship, and it’s been stated that in reality the relationship wasn’t as close as it was made out to be in the film. Of course it is a film and that does allow some creative liberties to be taken but the relationship between the two seemed to emulate the heterosexual relationships between characters we see so regularly in cinema.
It wouldn’t be as bad, or dare I say insulting, if Morten Tyldum (director) and Graham Moore (screenwriter) had placed Turing in a relationship with a man at some point in the film as well even if it is a fictitious one especially as they were taking liberties with his and Clarkes'. It would have been interesting to see him and his actions when with another man in contrast to his situation with Clarke as it was a time of shocking intolerance and we’d likely get to see other peoples views regarding the issue of homosexuality. Other than the police officer there are three other characters within the film that know about Turing’s sexuality and they don’t seem to have too much of a reaction to the news. This seems like the film is making light of the attitudes to homosexuality in the 40s and 50s even though he was convicted in the end. I’m not saying that there had to be a gratuitous sex scene but we needed something to sort of counteract his relationship with Joan and show the audience who he really was and what he had to deal with. A line about a rent boy doesn’t quite cut it.
The cast and crew behind the film have responded to critics pointing out that the film did depict a homosexual relationship with Turing and Christopher Morcom. My issue with this was that he was only a child at the time and the relationship seemed innocent to me, I understand that they placed that in there to show he was in love with Morcom but it just didn’t work. Turing had an admiration for Morcom who was an older boy, young boys behave like that now it doesn’t mean that they are homosexual. They could have scrapped most of the Turing childhood scenes or some of the Joan Clarke scenes and added Turing in an adult relationship when he is aware of his sexuality and the dangers of it.
To be frank his sexuality seemed to be a footnote in the story when it shouldn’t have been. Being a gay man in the 40s and 50s in London would have been an incredibly trying time, it would have been brilliant to watch him juggle his secret life working for the government and attempting to keep his sexuality hidden when he was a sexually active gay man. I’d rather have that than a fictitious relationship between him and Joan which we have seen in film after film. This is supposed to be a biopic, we are supposed to have a well rounded scope of Turing’s life but we were robbed of it.
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