Mick Jagger at Monday night's Enigma screening

By Jeffrey Wells

Michael Apted's Enigma, the $25 million (give or take) World War II espionage drama with Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam, screened to a packed crowd last night at the Eccles Theatre. But the highest voltage came from the appearance of aging rock star Mick Jagger, who produced the war drama along with Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels.

Yeah, I agree. They're an odd-sounding couple to have pooled forces on a nail-biter about deciphering Nazi codes. Nonetheless there they were, sitting side by side in the ninth or tenth row and the cause of much strenuous neck-craning.

Enigma is a thriller for which you have to put on your thinking cap to fully enjoy. Tom Stoppard's script employs a very complex and highly detailed plot that I found personally fascinating, if a bit challenging. The target audience is obviously the over-30 crowd. I can't imagine the Dude, Where's My Car? crowd having much patience or interest in such a highly cerebral package.

Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott in Enigma

The story is partly — largely? — based on fact. Dougray Scott plays a dweeby, unshaven, but undeniably brilliant British code-breaker who, aided by a plucky war department secretary played by a mousy-looking Kate Winslet, manages to untangle a complex mystery involving possible domestic traitors and a mass execution of Polish solders by Russian troops that leads to the cracking of a newly instituted Nazi transmission code. Northam plays a snide and insinuating government agent who makes trouble for Scott and Winslet all the way through.

Maybe I'm just not smart enough, but I found it difficult here and there to process and sort out the myriad details and plot twists. But I enjoyed the exercise. There is also, to placate those with simpler minds and tastes, a fair amount of action-thriller clichés — a car chase, a shootout, explosions, a nude scene with a beautiful actress (i.e., Saffron Burrows), a boorish bureaucrat getting decked with a well-deserved right cross, and so on.

The response to Enigma was somewhere between admiring and appreciative. But there was no ambiguity about the excitement in the hall when Jagger, preceded a horde of photographers and video crews, began making his way down the right aisle. Dressed in a bright blue suit, Jagger also got the biggest applause when the filmmakers took the stage after the showing.

It was hell trying to get a shot of Jagger as he came into the theater. Publicists and security goons kept telling me to move, step aside, etc. I was barked at and then yanked out of a group of photographers at one point, at the behest of Jagger's reps. There was a Park City cop who seemed especially angry and upset about my transgression. His upper lip was almost quivering with rage.

Source: Reel.com's Sundance Confidential