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Alan Turing was a better man than his country deserved. One of Britain’s all-time greatest patriots, he was a winner of wars, a saver of lives, a discoverer of realms . . . It doesn’t get more glorious than that, and yet, in the end, the man’s beloved country treated him like shite, first shrouding him in Cold War obscurity and then cramming him deeper into the sexual closet. In the final indignity, a thankless government looked on while some prick of a police inspector hounded the poor man to death . . . Just awful, awful stuff.
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Sound familiar? It is. Think Oscar Wilde. Or Quentin Crisp. Or any of the nameless, numberless Britishers persecuted under the Buggery Acts. When you see how cruelly they treated an “essential” man like Alan Turing, you can infer what treatment the rest of them got. The one’s who didn’t have any protection at all.* When you know what’s in store for Turing AFTER the war, it almost makes you want to cheer for the Germans. Almost.
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Back to the film . . . I enjoyed it very much. I think it’s valuable, and important. So why then do I give it a “goodish” instead of a “greatish.” Well, I feel bad for doing that, really, yet I have to, because I’m not measuring it at least partly against my expectations. The film makers bit off more than they and the audience could possibly chew here. Not that I blame them, mind you. There’s simply too much there to tell in a couple of hours and change. The acting and directing are quite good, actually. But the plot moves along at a break-neck pace from the beginning, and I felt like a restaurant patron who’s perpetually being offered morsels, without ever being given enough to eat.
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Breaking the Enigma code? That story deserves hours or days, not minutes.
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Turing’s autism? Another few hours.
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Persecution as a gay? Still more hours.
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His contribution to computer science? Mathematics? The “Turing Test”? . . .
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Oh, man. You’d need several hours just to give laypeople the proper BACKGROUND. Only then you could start in on Turing’s contribution.
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So, how could one expect a two-hour movie to do justice to all that? The answer: one couldn’t.
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Still. It’s a start. At least now we are beginning to understand how much this guy did for us. And how awfully we repaid the favor.
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*You can make the same kind of inference about gay Americans, but right now,we’re talking about Britain.
