Cumberbatch for the day

The BBC has an article by Owen Gleiberman about Benedict Cumberbatch:

Benedict Cumberbatch plays the man who broke a Nazi code. It’s a part he was born to play, says critic Owen Gleiberman:

There's a film festival taking place somewhere in the world just about every week now, but three monumental events still tower over the rest: Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto. You could make the case that Toronto, in the overtly tasteful way that it ushers in the awards season, has in recent years trumped the other two, at least, in terms of sheer media influence. From The Descendants to Moneyball to Silver Linings Playbook to 12 Years a Slave to Gravity, Toronto is the festival that, more than any other, helps to launch the very idea of mainstream quality movies into orbit.
Given that, a funny thing happened at Toronto this year. Yes, it showcased some highly accomplished and celebrated awards-bait contenders, like Foxcatcher and Rosewater and Wild. But none of those carried the weight of awards inevitability the way that, say, 12 Years a Slave did last year. They were good films, but they weren't quintessential awards movies. For that, you had to seek out a pair of earnest and rather genteel biopics, each so fundamentally old-fashioned that they seemed to have come out of a time warp.
The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who led the team that cracked the Enigma Code during World War Two. It has an excruciatingly civilized British hero who's a crowd-pleasing genius, and whose brilliance is bedeviled by a dramatic affliction: in Turing's case, he's struggling to evade persecution for his homosexuality. As an actor, Benedict Cumberbatch (photo) can do just about anything, but even after playing a le Carré spy, a slave master, a Star Trek villain and Julian Assange, he may never have had a role that fits him with the emotionally tailored perfection of Alan Turing. It's at the start of World War Two, when Turing, tweedy yet becalmed, is asked to join a select team of mathematical eggheads tasked with decoding the cryptographic system the Nazis are using to send their military messages. The British possess a stolen Enigma machine, which means that they can receive the daily Nazi missives in coded form; they just can't read them.
It's the starting point for what sounds like a crackerjack puzzle-thriller. except that, once the movie settles into the grand shadowy confines of Bletchley Park, the site of the UK’s Government Code and Cypher School, it's a little like watching the Masterpiece Theatre version of the Manhattan Project. What seizes us, more than the actual breaking of the code (since, to be honest, it's almost impossible to understand how that was done), is Turing's peculiar personality; his mixture of decency and diffidence, his complete (and therefore hilarious) inability to tell a joke and the obsessive way that he rouses himself from his academic civility to do whatever it takes. That means, early on, sneaking a message to Winston Churchill– that's how he wins the right to lead the team– or deciding that, instead of sitting around and trying to decipher messages, he's going to build a machine to do it for him. A machine that will, one day, be known as a computer.
The key members of Turing's team, played by the genial and cutting Matthew Goode and the radiantly staunch Keira Knightley, think that Turing is an anti-social head case. The amazingly dry wit in Cumberbatch's performance cues us to see how Turing, in his repressive dolefulness, is, in fact, driven solely by a desire to save lives and win the war. That he's willing to be a monomaniac about it is the measure of his humanity.
Far more dramatic than the deciphering of the code is the moment when Turing figures out that they’ll have to keep the fact that they've cracked the code a secret. Because if they overplay their hand, the Nazis will figure out that they've cracked it. And so Turing devises a statistical system that will balance how many secrets they can use (without giving the game away) and how many Allied casualties they can stand. It's realpolitik of an unimaginable order, and the film's implication is that only a man like Turing, who hid his sexuality as if his life depended on it (which perhaps it did), could have been on such intimate terms with the creativity of secrecy. What he himself viewed as his ‘defect’ becomes, in fact, the cornerstone of his wartime heroism. This is a very clandestine way to make a liberal message movie, but it works. You could almost say that it serves up Oscar bait in code.

Rico says that, now that Martin Freeman is done with the stupid Hobbit movie, Cumberbatch should get back to making Sherlock as well...