Enigma

As long-time readers of this blog may know, I am crazy about two things.

Puzzles and Benedict Cumberbatch.

(But not necessarily in that order.)

And the new movie, The Imitation Game, showcases both of them.

It’s the true story of codebreaker and mathematics genius Alan Turing, whose brilliant insights and incredible “universal machine” cracked Germany’s Enigma cypher code. The Bletchley Park codebreakers probably shortened World War II by two years.

And they saved millions of lives with their heroic and top, TOP secret mental efforts.

After much anticipation, I saw The Imitation Game on Friday. 

And I’m sad to report that I didn’t much care for it.

It’s just ok- kind of a mash-up of Masterpiece Theatre meets Revenge of the Nerds.

In the filmmakers’ zeal to do right by the legacy and burnish the luster of Alan Turing, its tone was positively reverential.

And ponderous.

(And the soundtrack was off-putting.  Soaring, majestic, ominous.  It put in mind of those old-time piano players in the silent movies days. Ok, I get it.  I don’t have to be prodded into feeling scared or uplifted. Let me do the emotional work myself, ok?)

I’ll not quibble here with all the movie’s historical inaccuracies.  A laymen would never know fact from fiction, and it doesn’t really matter.  Poetic license and all that.

(Although it was kind of World War II For Dummies.)

What matters is that the moment I read that the beauteous, luminous, ultra-adorable Keira Knightley had been cast as Joan Clark- math and crosswords wiz and Turing putative love interest- I knew we were in for it.

The Hollywoodization of a true story that is far more compelling.  If you just let it alone.

Turing’s life is one of secret triumph and very public persecution.  His torment at the hands of the vile and inhumane anti-homosexual laws in England is truly terrible.

And my screen idol, terrific actor Benedict Cumberbatch, was hamstrung, too, by the fact that he was portraying an icon.

He’s very clever of course, and will probably garner an Oscar nod.  But to my mind, Derek Jacobi set the Turing bar in the movie Breaking the Code.  I think his portrayal serves the man much better.

Here’s a clip.  You can watch the whole thing on Youtube.

If you’re on the fence about The Imitation Game, go see it.  You could spend your time and money in worse ways.  But this will never win Best Picture Oscar.

(And Birdman blew my mind.  Emma Stone and Edward Norton just killed me.  Way more fascinating flick.)

But The Imitation Game did put me in mind of an incident I hadn’t thought about for years.

It was 1995, and my son Nick- then about fifteen- was a big fan of the band, Rage Against The Machine.  And he was excited because he was headed out to their concert that night.

I happened to see him before he left the apartment.  He was all dolled up wearing his favorite shirt- a blue and white striped auto mechanic’s work shirt with the name “Chuck”  embroidered in script over the pocket in heavy red thread.

(In fact, it might have said “Joe” or “Aloysius” or “Nigel,” but if I text Nick to ask him what name the shirt bore, he’ll know instantly that I’m writing about this, and that will lead to an unpleasant conversation, and that will lead to an ukase, and that will lead to me flaunting his authority, and then Nick will want to put me in the Bad Mother gulag, and so for the sake of this post, let’s all agree that the name was “Chuck.”)

“Have fun, honey,” I called as he strode out.  “Enjoy the concert.”

What did I know?  When it came to rock concerts, I automatically thought back to some of the great ones that I had attended in my youth- the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes, Simon and Garfunkel,

And the two  that I memorably didn’t attend.  Gerry and the Pacemakers with Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, and the legendary soul man Otis Redding.

I missed out on Gerry and the Pacemakers (“Ferry Cross The Mersey” was their big song that year) because on the way to the Arie Crown theater, my boyfriend Bruce’s car hit a guard rail and we never made it to the show.

A huge cover-up then when into play.  Not with the cops- with my mother.

If she had ever known that I had been in a car accident, she would have reacted with her usual understanding by grounding me forever immediately.  I had to make up a whole song roster for her when I came home that night.

I missed out on Otis Redding because of another kind of an accident. A fatal one.

After a fancy steak dinner at Smoky’s in Madison, Wisconsin, my boyfriend Jon and I hurried over to hear him.  We were summarily told that we were too late.  Otis’s plane had just crashed into Lake Monona, killing everyone except one member of the Bar-Kays.

There would be no concert that night.

But in the main, my memories of the concerts I had seen were happy ones.

True, Brian Jones had given the audience the finger and had stormed off the stage, and you couldn’t hear one note that the Beatles played because of all the girls screaming, and the audience booed for awhile when Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar, but even so, this was pretty tame stuff.

So I wasn’t prepared for Nick’s appearance when he came back in that night.

(In those days Nick and Natasha went to boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island.  Because he wasn’t home in Chicago much- he preferred to spend all his vacay in Colorado- Nick’s bedroom doubled as my office.)

I was working late on my computer when he staggered in.

Sweaty, bleary-eyed, bleeding…

And shirtless.

I mean starkers from the top up.

I was alarmed at his appearance.  He looked awful.

“What happened to you?  Where’s your shirt?” I cried.

“It got ripped off,’ he snarled.

“Well, for heaven’s sake, why did you take it off and let someone steal it?  It was your favorite shirt,” I countered logically.

“I didn’t take it off.  I was in the mosh pit and it got RIPPED OFF of me!”

Uh oh.  Times had definitely changed since Billy J. Kramer.

“And I need your help with something, Dude,” he went on to say.  “I met this really cool girl at the concert tonight and she wrote down her telephone number.  I want to call her right away and I can’t.”

“You’re right.  It’s  way too late to call her now.  Why don’t you wait until the morning…”

“No, you don’t get it, Dude.  She wrote her number on my arm and I sweated off the last three digits.  I need your help trying all the combinations.  Will you do it?”

He held out the runny ink stain for me to see.

Do you have any idea how many telephone number combinations that is?

(And no fair, George.  You probably know.)

But my son looked at me with such pleading eyes…and besides, I couldn’t resist the challenge.

For the rest of the night, we tried various different sequences.

Without any luck.

Paging Alan Turing.

(And welcome to the mosh pit.  Shirts optional.)