Another Movie About Heroic Mr. Turing
Although it’s not quite as well-assembled as the current feature “The Imitation Game,” “Codebreaker” provides another window into the life of Alan Turing (Ed Stoppard, right). Part-documentary with talking heads and archive footage and part-dramatization of Turing’s therapy sessions with psychiatrist Franz Greenbaum (Henry Goodman, left) over the last 18 months of his life, “Codebreaker,” which is available on Netflix, is another in a distinguished line of programs aimed at rehabilitating the reputation of one of Britain’s finest minds. As rehabilitation, it worked well, highlighting both the inhumanity with which he was treated and the importance of his pioneering work in artificial intelligence and morphogenesis, as well as his wartime code-breaking, and suggesting that his early death might have set back mathematics by several decades. That death, by the way, came at the hands of a poison apple laced with cyanide. Turing apparently had a fascination with Disney’s “Snow White” and the poisoned apple the wicked witch gave her. “The Imitation Game” script originally included Turing’s apple-suicide, but the scene was cut.
