Let it never be said that I was anything but attentive, engaged and impressed by Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game when I saw it in Telluride two and half months ago. It’s a touching, intelligent, well-crafted film. But a piece I posted on 9.9 called “The Crowd Demands” is nonetheless valid. I noted that Game, boiled down, is “almost entirely” about how the World War II-era superiors and co-workers of the great Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) “didn’t care for his personality or resented his genius, or a combination thereof.” It’s really a film about a group of bright careerists relentlessly giving a genius grief, over and over and over. Except for Keira Knightley, of course.
“In scene after scene we watch Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park colleagues express irritation and disdain about his aloof, superior manner and general lack of social skills,” I wrote. “It reminds us of a lesson that we all have to learn and swallow early on, which is that you must be pleasantly sociable with people you work with (or hang or go to school with) because they’ll make your life hell if you’re not.