TORONTO—How to describe “The Imitation Game,” Harvey Weinstein’s latest play in the annual Academy Awards game?
If “The King’s Speech” met “A Beautiful Mind” on “Brokeback Mountain,” they might add up to this movie.
Based on the real-life story of the British mathematician Alan Turing, “The Imitation Game” — directed by Morten Tyldum, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley in lead roles — tells of the ultimately successful quest to break the military code used by Nazi Germany in World War II. Mr. Weinstein has talked lately of making this his main push for the Oscar season.
Toronto International Film Festival
Features, news, interviews and more.
What’s unnerving about that is how much sense that makes.
Put differently, “The Imitation Game,” which screened recently at the Telluride Film Festival and was shown to press and industry insiders at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, is a nearly perfect Oscar bet. It is almost as if the early computer designed by Mr. Turing to help with his code-breaking had been asked to create an awards-worthy film.
Like “The King’s Speech,” a best picture winner in 2011, “The Imitation Game” is about a socially inept Brit — in this case, the Cambridge scholar Mr. Turing, in the earlier film, the stuttering King George VI — who rises to become a crucial force in saving the world from Nazism.
Much like “A Beautiful Mind,” which won the best picture Oscar in 2002, the new movie is about a troubled thinker’s triumph in the field of cryptography.
Not unlike “Brokeback Mountain,” which was nominated for best picture in 2006, “The Imitation Game” is also about the secret lives of gay men in an era that did not tolerate them.
But the Oscar-ready elements don’t end there.
The running scenes and Alexandre Desplat’s score seem a tribute to “Chariots of Fire,” which was named best picture in 1982. Mr. Turing’s status as a genius who is impaired by some never-quite-named disability distinctly recalls “Rain Man,” which was named best picture in 1989. And his affection for a self-designed computer, called Christopher, echoes “200l: A Space Odyssey,” with its nearly human processor, HAL 9000.
“The Imitation Game” even nips a little bit of “Star Trek,” which, in its 2009 incarnation, took four Oscar nominations, and one win, for best achievement in makeup. Like Mr. Spock, Mr. Cumberbatch’s Turing is coldly focused on logic, to the detriment of merely emotional considerations.
Whether all of those elements, clicking and turning like the wheels on Mr. Turing’s computer, actually add up to an integrated winner, the audience, critics, and Oscar voters will have to decide.