The Imitation Game

How do you play The Imitation Game? First, you mimic The King's Speech, by taking the high moral certainties and elegant, aristocratic reserve of mid-century England. Next, you roll the dice on a social message that will give you a safe return on your investment; no need to go full-on 12 Years A Slave, but no harm in cribbing a little from the superiority complex we moderns hold against our ancestors. Add a few Britons from prestige TV, and the Old Hollywood tortured and/or misunderstood genius routine that's so hoary that even the World War II-era characters know it to be a shtick. And finally, be named Harvey Weinstein. If you win, you can pick up your trophy in February.

The game is rigged, of course. And these costume dramas about iconoclasts always back up against their own variation of the quandary that Y-A movies run into: Everything that set Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, apart is reduced to the same old autistic damn-fool that we always get as "the price one pays for genius." [S.M.H.] To be fair, his downfall was that of a tragic hero: His code-breaking machine helped defeat Hitler and save the world. The insult of being prosecuted for indecency only a few years later, when the law against homosexual acts was still on the books, must have been compounded by the irony that all who knew he was a hero couldn't speak out. Everything that he contributed to the war effort was a state secret for 50 years. He was undergoing chemical castration when he died, possibly of suicide, at 41. His was the case that breaks the cliché; he was ahead of his time.

The film, for its part, sticks to its awards-season time warp. But it isn't boring. It's Anglophile soul food, with an I.Q. infusion that diminishes upon digestion. It does a few things very well, like the casting of the boarding-school scenes and Benedict Cumberbatch's performance; Keira Knightley's mirth, by contrast, is wearing rather thin. Turing himself might have perfected the algorithm the filmmakers use to drop every quip, reveal each character, and jerk every tear at all appointed intervals. That is it's well made for what it is, and what it is is something you can take the whole family to, except for the great-uncle nobody talks to because he belongs to the Westboro Baptist Church.