"Kate Winslet (Quills and some film about a boat), in her most fully-clothed role for some time (sorry lads) is equally good as the ugly duckling friend of Burrow’s femme fatale."

"These two are on screen for almost the whole film, and provide the main motor for the plot. Winslet is particularly good in portraying a woman who realises she is at least as intelligent and capable as the men she works with, but that her gender will always keep her down."

BFG Contact Preview - Enigma
June 2001

British mathematician Alan Turing is now recognised as one of the fathers of computing (his suicide by eating a poisoned apple inspired the name of a well-known computer company) but the work which gained him this position was one of the best-kept secrets of the war.

So secret, in fact, that even Winston Churchill did not mention it in his history of the war. This work was using primitive computers (called bombes) to break the German’s most ‘unbreakable’ code, Enigma. However, this film, a fictional story based around the facts of this secret war, is not a techie-feast, but chooses instead to look at the human dimension of the work.

Tom Jericho (Scott) is a maths genius who was hired on the first day of the war to work at Station X, the code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park. We first see him, though, returning to the Park in 1943 after having been sent away to recover from a nervous breakdown. But was the breakdown caused by the stress of his ultimately successful effort to find away into the Enigma code, or by the end of his relationship with the beautiful but enigmatic (pun intended) Claire Romilly (Burrows)? And has he recovered enough to be able to help with the urgent problem facing British Intelligence: the largest convoys ever assembled have set off from the USA just as the Germans have changed their U-boats’ code, making it once again unreadable. While Jericho is supposed to be helping the motley assortment of eggheads race to once again crack the code, he is distracted both by the disappearance of Claire and by a secret service agent (Northram) who thinks the Germans were tipped off by a mole in the Park, and suspects Jericho (and possibly Claire). Meanwhile, a small boy and his smaller dog have discovered something nasty in the woods in the Ukraine (trust me, that does become relevant).

The very English war film (only one bomb dropped, and minimal shagging) is based on the book by Robert Harris, and is remarkably faithful to it. However, the screenplay was written by Tom Stoppard, and there are flashes of his humour throughout, which provide welcome relief to what could otherwise be a heavy thriller. Less welcome are the occasional examples of dialogue tailored for the US market. (Would an officer of His Majesty’s Navy ever describe a situation as ‘a bitch’?) However, I suppose we have to soften the blow since this film reveals that World War 2 was not won solely by Tom Hanks or Ben Affleck.

Scott, last seen as the bad guy in MI2, gives a good performance as the harassed intellectual forced to be a man of action, while always teetering on the brink of another mental collapse. Kate Winslet (Quills and some film about a boat), in her most fully-clothed role for some time (sorry lads) is equally good as the ugly duckling friend of Burrow’s femme fatale. These two are on screen for almost the whole film, and provide the main motor for the plot. Winslet is particularly good in portraying a woman who realises she is at least as intelligent and capable as the men she works with, but that her gender will always keep her down. This proto-feminism does not seem out of place, but is subtly played, and makes it more believable that these two could work as an effective team.

Northram (Possession, The Golden Bowl, An Ideal Husband), as the amusingly named Wigram, is very dry and snide, not bothering to hide his contempt for Jericho and the other codebreakers. He also has some of the best lines, and a commanding presence whenever he is on screen. Even when the spy is revealed, Wigram still seems the real villain of the piece, as he alone seems untouched by events, and gives the impression of a man whose career will only benefit from his machinations. By the way, the identity of the spy, and the tangled web behind Claire’s disappearance, are not really problems on a par with the Enigma code, but they are fortunately not so obvious as to spoil the film.

The group of codebreakers with whom Jericho works are carefully selected to run the gamut of comedy English intellectual stereotypes, ranging from the pointless stutter (look, he must be intelligent, he’s so shy and ill-at-ease) to bearded Marxist (he’s so controversial in views and hair that he must be the spy). They also give the impression that corduroy was the only item not rationed in the war. However, this may be a reflection, however distorted, of historical reality: when Churchill met the real Bletchley Park eggheads, he is reported to have said that his command to look under every stone to find the best people was not supposed to have been taken so literally.

Apted manages to pump up the suspense at points throughout the film, notably in the scene where the codebreakers are racing to find a way into Enigma while the U-boats are closing in. However, he also allows room for the relationships between the characters to develop, so that this film never degenerates into just a geek-friendly war thriller with a love story slapped on like lipstick on a bulldog. Instead, the various strands of the story come together into a satisfying conclusion, even if the last scene is a little too pat. In all, this film is more intelligent, better written, and ultimately more entertaining than the other WW2 film around at the moment, and it has the added advantage of taking fewer liberties with historical reality.

Enigma, reviewed by BFG reporters Rupert Marsh and Rebecca Stimson

Director: Michael Apted

Stars: Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows

Source: BFG Contact