ENIGMA
1/2
Well-made, old-fashioned spy flick.
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (brief violence, sex). At the Empire 25, City Cinemas, Loews 84th Street, others.
‘ENIGMA” is a well-made, pleasingly old-fashioned espionage thriller-cum-romance that at its best feels like the Hitchcock classics (like “The 39 Steps”) to which it pays affectionate homage.
By the standards of today’s dumbed-down, shoot-’em-up spy flicks, it’s a demanding, rather stately film with a complicated structure and plot. But it boasts first-rate performances by a fine British cast. And unlike so many recent films set during WWII, it makes history exciting without dumbly distorting or misrepresenting it.
Like the best-selling novel by Robert Harris from which it is adapted, “Enigma” uses the compelling true story of the triumph of the Enigma code-breakers as background for an invented but believable story of love, betrayal and heroism.
(Enigma was the supposedly uncrackable code system used by the Germans. When scientists – including people like Alan Turing, the father of the computer – were able to break it, they helped change the course of the war.)
Dougray Scott (“MI2”) plays Tom Jericho, a brilliant young mathematician, who, as the movie begins, is returning to the Bletchley Park code-breaking center after a nervous breakdown.
As we learn in flashback, Jericho had made the mistake of falling for the ravishing, sexually promiscuous cipher clerk Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), who is now missing.
Jericho is still a broken man, but his eccentric team of code-breakers needs his skills more than ever – because soon after Claire’s disappearance, the Germans changed their naval codes, putting their U-boats in strategic position in the North Atlantic.
Jericho is also under pressure from Wigram (Jeremy Northam), a smooth but bullying counterintelligence agent who believes that Claire was a German mole.
In his efforts to prove her innocence, Jericho teams up with her shy, dowdy roommate, Hester (Kate Winslet). But long before the explosive climax, it becomes clear that the mysterious Claire was at the center of a web of plots and counterplots.
Though Scott gives a rich, nuanced performance as the hangdog Jericho, the film really belongs to Northam – perfect as the flippant, ruthless Wigram – and Winslet, who was born to play this period. Though cast as the “plain” girl, she’s never been more charming or adorable.
“Enigma” is directed by Michael Apted (“42-Up” “The World Is Not Enough”) from a clever script by Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”), and produced by Mick Jagger and Lorne Michaels.