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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Kate Winslet enlivens a clunky, honorable yarn about the tea-guzzling English eccentrics who broke the Nazi codes.
Apr 19, 2002 | "Enigma," a World War II thriller about British attempts to crack the German code, tells a complicated story in an often confusing manner. Adapting Robert Harris' bestseller, Tom Stoppard doesn't manage the remarkable clarity he brought to his script for Fred Schepisi's film of John le Carré's "The Russia House" (one of the best movie entertainments of the past few decades). Stoppard, with his love for games and especially word games, is the perfect choice to write a script about geniuses and misfits engaged in the most high-stakes word game of all. But the gamesmanship of "Enigma" never takes flight, and the script resorts to having the characters explain plot developments in big blocks of expository prose.
Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, "Enigma" lacks excitement and a vivid personality. And in the lead role of Tom Jericho, the top code breaker who's driven himself mad over the stress of his job and his not quite requited love for a woman, the unshaven and haggard Dougray Scott never pulls us into Jericho's precarious mental and emotional state. He often looks as if he's pissed off by the same thing that seems to piss off Russell Crowe during awards shows.
You can see everything that's wrong with "Enigma," though, and still have a pretty good time sitting through it, as I did. The movie isn't compelling. Apted lacks the cunning to give the central plot device -- the attempt to break the Nazi code before German U-boats can attack a convoy of Allied supply ships -- a sense of urgency. But a botched movie that feels as if it were made by human beings who actually give a damn about what they're doing is so far removed from the incompetent dreck that has been stinking up theaters since January that I found myself relaxing into "Enigma." It's a little like turning on the TV in the afternoon and stumbling onto some forgotten piece of British wartime intrigue on AMC, pleasant in a faintly stodgy way.
There are long stretches in this movie where the machinations of the plot eluded me. But compared to most of what's out there, "Enigma" is almost a luxuriant experience. When lovers canoodle by firelight in a cozy country cottage while John Barry's score swoons prettily on the soundtrack (and no one swoons more prettily than John Barry), or when the movie's group of eccentric code breakers -- a motley group of stutterers, Stalinists, aesthetes and Poindexters -- are taking the piss out of their pompous superior, the familiar conventions feel almost reassuring, as if somebody out there still has some vague notion of how to make a commercial movie. Although I'm not sure Stoppard intends it to be a joke, the dialogue often has the feel of British '40s movies, the sort that makes you laugh at the plumminess of it all: "Went off his trolley, didn't he -- about some girl?" or, "There's no sugar, I'm afraid. But it's lapsang, and I always think that sugar rather spoils lapsang, don't you?"
"Enigma"
Directed by Michael Apted
Starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
The movie is set in 1943 in Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking compound that was so top secret it wasn't even acknowledged as existing until the mid-'70s. Jericho has returned after a brief breakdown just as it becomes imperative to crack the German Enigma code. One of the things that sent Jericho "off his trolley" was Claire Romilley (Saffron Burrows, gorgeous in her sphinxlike, somnambulant manner), a fellow worker he was involved with. To Claire, Jericho was just one of her many conquests. But Jericho became besotted with her to the point of offering to spill the secrets he was meant to keep if she would stay with him. Back at Bletchley, Jericho finds evidence that suggests Claire may be working for the other side and he teams up with her plain-Jane roommate Hester (Kate Winslet) to find out what she was on to, and hopefully to clear her. Meanwhile, another intelligence agent, Wigram (Jeremy Northam), is keeping close tabs on Jericho and Hester, trying to find out what they know.
