The Imitation Game / The Theory of Everything: Reviews by Kaveeta Keswani.

Two tales of two scientists, both brilliant, both damned, one gets a chance or several by the universe to overcome his nemesis, and one doesn’t.

I will start with The Imitation Game which stars one of my favourite actors of today – he totally floored me in Sherlock (the BBC series), which I can seem to watch again and again.  The film aspires to tell us the story of the unsung war hero Alan Turing (Mathematician, Crypto-analyst), who with his team and machine (his invention) cracked the Nazi code – ‘Enigma’, during the World War. He is said to have save two years of wartime and 14 million lives. The screenplay was written by Graham Moore based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

The film highlights key periods of his brief life, his lonely school years as a student, the success of his secret wartime work on the revolutionary electro-mechanical bombe (Christopher), which was capable of breaking 3,000 Enigma-generated naval codes a day; and the tragedy of his post-war decline following his conviction for gross indecency, a criminal offence stemming from his admission of maintaining a homosexual relationship.

What I loved about the film was Cumberbatches’ powerful portrayal of a character- lonely, brilliant, extremely caring in his relationships, but unable to make the emotional jump from emotion to lasting relationships, maybe because of his boarding school stiff upper lip upbringing, or his inner conflict to let reason win.

I like the way the director (Morten Tyldum) intersperses the present with charming english boarding school scenes from school and his best friend, Christopher, who he names his Bombe after. Though at times I felt it was a bit clinical in its treatment, leaving out large pieces of the puzzle called Turing, blank, especially in his relationship with his family and Joan Clarke (Keira Knightl). Some of the blanks were brilliantly filled by Cumberbatches acting, but when I left the film and even when it stayed with me the entire day- I had a lot of unanswered questions and gaps which I felt the film failed to address.

The Theory of Everything on the other hand did a much more well rounded job in comparison, it was thorough in its research, with all the background perfectly in place, the screenplay based on his ex-wifes memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Wild Hawking. It traces Hawkings life in Cambridge where he met Jane, whilst both were doing their PhD’s, and how they met and fell in love and together created a beautiful lifetime together, even when his own physician gave him two years to live.

Felicity Jones plays a determined, devoted wife to the fullest, and one wonders where she draws her strength from in the face of extremely demanding circumstances, and is a very inspiring figure in the film. She is the perfect foil for Eddie Redmaynes’ brilliant and historic performance in the film and I won’t be surprised if he wins the Oscar for this one. In fact I could bet on it even though I liked Cumberbatch in the other movie more, I mean he dons the character like as if it were an old worn coat and one really cannot differentiate between him and the real Stephen towards the latter half of the film.

Both the films are must watches (I Still prefer the treatment of going back and forth in time in The Imitation Game), the unsung hero in the first is the scientist himself and in the second, it is definitively, according to me Jane Hawking.