"Enigma"

"Enigma" takes far too long to tie Claire to the scramble to save the Allied convoy. The code breakers have only four days to do it and you have to wonder what Jericho thinks he's doing when he's devoting his time to the Claire problem. If Scott had managed to make Jericho's obsessive need for Claire stronger, his quest might have taken on the quality of a tragic flaw. As it is, it seems a distraction from the movie's main conflict. And Stoppard has skimped on the developing attraction between Jericho and Hester. I wanted more of them together, especially because of Winslet; there's something ludicrous about putting her in a big pair of round Kurt Weill glasses and asking us to see her as a dumpy, ordinary girl. Winslet has fun with it though, and she creates a young woman powered by her big brain who doesn't give a damn whether that turns off men or not. After a while I began fantasizing that Winslet was another fictional character, say, a grown-up version of Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter books.

And I wanted more than just this script's tossed-off sketches of the code breakers. Code breaking might be a puzzle more suited to books than to movies, but "Enigma" doesn't do all it might with these men. It doesn't give us the thrill of watching their whiz-kid minds at work and the satisfaction that these guys -- many of them unsuited to military service -- take in finding their own way to fight the war. (There is one moment that's so sentimental it seems to have been lifted from some WWII "In Which We Serve" fantasy: a young woman who works in a secret installation asking Jericho if there's any worth in what she and the women she works with are doing. "This is our only war," she explains. There's something so irreducibly decent about the desire to do good behind that question, and the way the actress delivers it, that the sentimentality doesn't keep it from being moving.)

As Wigram, Jeremy Northam seems to have found his niche. Like Hugh Grant, he appears to be one of those British actors who come to life playing a heel. (But he was awfully charming as Ivor Novello in "Gosford Park"; I could have happily listened to him singing those music-hall songs for far longer.) Northam wears his fedora and the overcoat draped around his shoulders so nattily that you want to applaud his style alone. That outer style filters down to his line readings, which are cutting, dry and frequently very funny. I don't know if Robert Harris has any plans to do sequels or spinoffs of his novel, but Northam suggests one of those great stylish sleuths -- the Saint as a British intelligence agent -- and the idea seems a natural.

"Enigma" has none of the thrill of the shock you find in the code-breaking sections of Neal Stephenson's novel "Cryptonomicon," a great fat boy's-book adventure for the cyber age. And it has none of the suspense you can still find in British wartime espionage movies like Carol Reed's "Night Train to Munich" or the enjoyably trifling "Q-Planes" with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. But World War II thrillers all work from an advantage; the importance of "the fight" is a given. We all have a stake in the outcome. Even with all its botches, "Enigma" offers all the pleasure of a handsome and well-made entertainment, familiar and worn out but with a professionalism that's rather comforting. It's not the great movie yet to be made on the subject, but I'm sure I'm not the only one grateful to the makers of "Enigma" for placing the credit for breaking the German code back it belongs: with the British. After the cultural theft perpetrated two years ago by "U-571," this modest restoration feels like an act of decency.

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