#270: Enigma
The only enigma is who thought this movie counts as historical
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 11, 2020.
Initial release: January 22, 2001
Director: Michael Apted
There’s two kinds of war movies. One is a close retelling of actual events, perhaps with some embellishments for the sake of drama. The other is completely made up, even if real events would get in the way. Enter Michael Apted’s Enigma, a thoroughly ahistorical mess of a film.
Bletchley Park is known today as the home of the Codebreakers, the stomping grounds of Alan Turing and the birthplace of the digital computer. Turing himself would get hard done by in the later film The Imitation Game, but he doesn’t even appear in this film. Instead we get the entirely fictional “Tom Jericho,” a cranky nerd just back from a month’s convalescence following a nervous breakdown. While it’s often assumed by his colleagues that he cracked from the stress of the job, it was actually over a failed whirlwind relationship. He gets pulled back into work because the Germans have changed their codebooks, and the Allies are in the dark just as an enormous merchant marine convoy has left New York for Europe, laden with supplies for the eastern front. Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend has disappeared.
He soon strikes up an acquaintance with his ex’s housemate Hester (Kate Winslet, the only famous face in this film) who also works at Bletchley Park. She’s a brilliant analyst but due to her gender has been relegated to clerical work — but she wants to find her housemate just as much as he does. Meanwhile, an MI5 agent is convinced that someone inside Bletchley Park has turned traitor, and he’s been keeping an eye on everyone on his short list that might be responsible for Germany going dark — and that includes Tom.
It’s soon clear that something bigger is at stake here, with the missing ex-girlfriend being linked to some German intercepts that the Allies want to cover up… because they’re about the Katyn massacre, the mass slaughter of thousands of Polish people by the Soviets in 1940. The massacre occurred following the Soviet invasion of Poland; thousands of Polish soldiers, many of them college educated due to Poland’s conscription system at the time, were captured without incident, and any who didn’t show sufficient loyalty to the Soviet Union was executed. Three years later, the Nazis, now having rolled into the former Soviet holdings, stumbled upon the mass graves left behind by the Soviets; the discovery was a major propaganda coup for Germany, which tried to drive a wedge between Poland, the Soviet Union, and the western Allies. It’s not hard to see why the western Allies, especially the British, would want to hush this up, as the Soviet Union was a major partner in the war on Germany, and Churchill was willing to excuse abuses on the part of the Soviets for the sake of maintaining a united front.
So this isn’t a biopic about Alan Turing, or a docudrama about Bletchley Park as a whole, or the Colossus computer. Nor is this a romance film, despite the requisite romantic element. It’s not really a spy movie either. At heart it’s a mystery about a disappeared woman. All the guff about cryptology, the Enigma machine, the Katyn massacre, that’s all window dressing for a slightly twisty mystery that would probably work better if the male lead didn’t come off as such a whiny creep in his own flashbacks after he gets dumped. Kate Winslet is authentically mousey with glasses, but she’s arguably the real driver of the film; while Tom is at work on an audacious plan to use the (apparently inevitable) massacre of the convoy to crack the new code, her character is the one who solves the mystery of the intercepts.
Sadly the most interesting characters get only a little bit of screen time during scenes in Tom’s work room; ironically, the avowed Communist in the bunch gladly excuses Stalin’s sacrifice of five million Soviets in an argument for sacrificing the convoy, “for the greater good.”
The lack of Turing is conspicuous. A film about Bletchley Park without Turing in it is fundamentally missing something important, as it was his work and his machines — including the analog computers featured prominently — that helped win the war. Yet on the other hand, maybe the film doesn’t really need him, as it’s not about him or his machines (though Tom at one point declares his motivation for tracking down the traitor as a defense of his work and “his” machines, proving that he’s supposed to be the Turing stand-in. Nevermind that he’s heterosexual and Turing very much was not, and suffered for it.)
If you can ignore the deeper issues, this is an okay film with some okay cinematography and editing that doesn’t go too deep in the romance aspect, preferring to focus on a mystery with an ambiguous, vaguely unsatisfactory ending.
