Enigma
10:45pm, BBC Two
If recent box office hit The Imitation Game has fired your interest in the story of codebreaker Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, then this Dougray Scott-starring adaptation of the Robert Harris book is deserving of your telly time. A cross between a TV drama about life during wartime and a tribute to the stiff upper lip movies of old, Enigma is a character-driven espionage thriller with a great double act from Dougray Scott as the troubled boffin Tom Jericho and Kate Winslet as Hester, his frumpy ally at Bletchley. The film eschews depicting the great acts of derring-do in favour of the small parts that people played in winning the war and against this backdrop, director Michael Apted builds a mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jericho's former lover Clare (Saffron Burrows). Has she just had enough and run away, or is there a link between her vanishing and the appearance of smarmy intelligence man Wigram (brilliantly played by Jeremy Northam) at Bletchley?
https://filmsonthebox.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/enigma-2001/
When it’s on: Saturday, 14 March (10.45 pm)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link
In the build-up to this year’s Academy Awards, I managed to catch a screening of The Imitation Game and enjoyed it very much, in fact second to The Grand Budapest Hotel it was the entry from which I derived the most pleasure. It tells the story of troubled genius Alan Turning with surprisingly little sentiment, letting the facts of his oddities and homosexuality speak for themselves whilst making clear to viewers the extent of his achievement in cracking the Enigma code. Great work from Benedict Cumberbatch, the sort of actor who, for me, was yet to live up to all the hype, until this at any rate.
The film does a very good job of cancelling out any impact made by the more fictional Enigma, a movie released in 2001 and based on the novel by Robert Harris. It tells much the same story, but replaces Turing with a romantic, straight hero, played by Dougray Scott, and throwing in a plotline about uncovering traitors within the heart of the Bletchley community, a crew of clever people brought together in order to work on breaking encrypted Nazi communication. Doing so makes for a decent thriller, but excising Turing altogether leaves a sense of shame. Would telling the true story of the man behind the code have made for a lesser film? Clearly not, though it’s heartening to see public exoneration In recent years of a man who individually did more for the war effort than pretty much anyone. Certainly, the city of Manchester has done much to apologise for its part in his shameful early demise.
In Enigma, Scott plays Tom Jericho, a highly intelligent mathematician who has previously designed a sophisticated machine to crack the German cipher used on its Enigma machines. At the same time, he’s fallen in love with fellow Bletchley worker Claire (Saffron Burrows), the glamorous blonde who leaves him broken hearted and is partly to blame for his nervous breakdown. Semi-recovered, he returns only to find Claire has vanished, her steps being traced by shadowy intelligence agent Wigram (Jeremy Northam), whilst the U-Boat attacks have started to increase as the Nazis have changed one of their reference books, leaving the code-breaking team to go back to work before more convoys crossing the North Atlantic are destroyed. Searching for Claire, Jericho enlists the help of her housemate, the altogether frumpier Hester (Kate Winslet), and together they piece together her movements before she disappeared. Evidence suggests Claire had something to do with the Germans discovering their codes had been broken, possibly that she was a traitor feeding information to the enemy. As Jericho begins to relive his brief affair with Claire, he remembers her going through his stuff, pressing him for the secrets he possessed. Was she using sex as part of a double agent’s work?
The peeling away of revelations is quite well told, with the characters given great lines by writer Tom Stoppard to emphasise the high IQ levels floating around Bletchley, but at the centre of it all Scott does something really interesting as Jericho, playing him as essentially exhausted. The juxtaposition between the present man and the younger guy falling in love is brilliantly told, those earlier scenes bathed in sunlight and Jericho appearing optimistic and highly alive, as opposed to the jaded, post-breakdown character who can hardly be bothered to lift his head when merchant ships and thousands of lives are in danger of being lost. All he cares about is Claire, the pain of losing her clear to see and made worse because he realises that whether she’s found or not, her exit from his life is permanent.
Elsewhere, Winslet is a bit of a surprise in her dressed down part, but has no trouble nailing the cleverness and latent sexuality of her character. Northam is fantastic, one of those smooth, reptilian performances that reveals nothing about himself whilst projecting out onto other people. As Claire, Burrows has little to do but show why men fall madly in love with her, which they do easily enough. There’s a great supporting cast of emerging British actors, including a very fresh faced Tom Hollander and Matthew Macfadyen. Danish actor, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, currently stealing the show in Game of Thrones, is present as one of the Bletchley code breakers, somehow looking great despite all those sleepless nights working through page after page of encrypted messages.
Director Michael Apted had been directing since the early 1960s, best known for his work on the Up series of television documentaries whilst bringing an eclectic body of cinematic work to bear. His is a sure hand, lending the film a slow burning tension, a steady unraveling of the secrets locked within Bletchley, which is about right for the material. Clues, when they emerge, are hard earned and have consequences. It’s not the best tale for those who like their thrillers to come with high concept spills; one glance at the knackered looking Scott should put paid to that. Even the film’s biggest action set piece, a car chase along English country roads, appears to be running at half the speed of your average Hollywood caper. But it’s well acted, nicely spun together and ends on an appropriately bittersweet moment.
Enigma: ***
2 thoughts on “Enigma (2001)”
Colin
March 14, 2015 / 9:16 am
This is the kind of movie I like but, for some reason, I missed it when it played in the cinema, and I still haven’t seen it. Even if it’s a fictionalized version of the code breaking operation, I can live with that as long as there’s a reasonably solid story there, I’ll have to track this down.
Mike
March 14, 2015 / 11:06 am
Thanks Colin. I think you would like it – despite the language and one scene involving slight nudity, it has a very ‘classical’ feel to it, and Stoppard’s dialogue is great in places. It’s dirt cheap also, I think the copy I bought from Amazon for this review was less than three quid.
All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt. (Charles M. Schulz)
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