"Kate Winslet, as the shy but gutsy plain Jane overshadowed by her friend Claire, does dowdy rather well."

Director: Michael Apted

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

YOU don’t have to be a drooling trainspotter to realise that certain things are just wrong. Why must a film set during the Second World War, which is - ironically - high on telling, accurate detail, be thrown off track by an entire train in British Railways livery? After all, director Michael Apted - whose Coal Miner’s Daughter plus the documentary series 7 Up and its sequels had everything in the right place - wouldn’t have a wartime Enigma code-breaker yacking into a mobile phone, would he?

That crude railway mistake apart, Apted has added to his track record of good films by directing a quiet but always pulsating version of Robert Harris’s spy thriller. Taking its cue from the real-life struggles of British operatives at Bletchley Park to crack the Germans’ Enigma code, the film adds the fictional tangled love affair between an extremely bright code-breaker, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), and a string-pulling, chameleon-like blonde, Claire (Saffron Burrows), who may or may not be a spy.

As Tom returns to Bletchley after an all-but-crippling nervous breakdown (brought on by his obsessive love for Claire), he is sneered at by his superiors for his supposed weakness, but respected by his peers for his big brain. This he needs in abundance to stop the Germans annihilating a fleet of Allied ships. Claire, meanwhile, is missing, possibly dead.

Both Apted and Tom Stoppard, who has written a perceptive, unadorned screenplay, have created an attractive balance between the reality of Bletchley and the ill-fated romance, with the latter never some glossy, empty sideshow, but a strand that feeds into the difficulty of breaking codes and the dark world of counter-espionage.

Each element, in fact, lifts the other. Continuous close-ups of tight-lipped young men in semi-lit rooms contribute to the uncertainty, paranoia and minute-by-minute pressure, as does a clutch of fine actors who never go off the chart towards hysteria and silliness. Scott, especially when silent (his accent leaps from non-specific northern English to his own Scots), powerfully suggests a man both decent and driven; Kate Winslet, as the shy but gutsy plain Jane overshadowed by her friend Claire, does dowdy rather well. And Jeremy Northam, as the secret service agent trying to make sense of the puzzle, is comically smooth as the epitome of icy English arrogance.

Source: The Scotsman