ENIGMA *** (out of ****) Starring Dougray Scott, Jeremy Northam, Kate Winslet, Saffron Burrows, Tom Hollander, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Directed by Michael Apted & written by Tom Stoppard, from the novel by Robert Harris 2001 R So this is where all the math that should have been in “A Beautiful Mind” went! Okay, there’s not that much math in “Enigma,” but this tale of World War II codebreakers sure is brainy.  All the codebreaking machines, typewriter devices, Morse code and beeping and signal towers, men reciting how many billion billion combinations of letters and numbers the Nazis could be using.  There were plenty of times in which I wouldn’t know what was happening if not for the music. But understanding the process of the math-science-codebreaking stuff isn’t crucial to enjoying “Engima.”  It is the kind of spy movie that predates Tom Clancy, in which the gadgets of spycraft do not take center stage.  Instead, espionage grows out of the persona, someone’s beliefs, personal problems, deceptions, sexual instincts.  It is never professional, but always somehow personal.  “Enigma” is a throwback to the heyday of John le Carre.  More specifically I am reminded of John Banville’s brilliant literary thriller “The Untouchable,” in which a homosexual secret agent in the 1950s turns spying into just another element of the double life so many gays led in a more conservative era. Speaking of homosexuals, real-life codebreaker Alan Turing does not appear in “Enigma,” even though the movie is set at the codebreaking facility where he worked, at the time he worked there.  Putting him in the movie would have certainly been a distraction, but present, in the background, is an unnamed codebreaker who stutters and wears a pink flower on his lapel.  Instead our focus is a mathematician named Tom Jericho who has just returned to a codebreaking camp in the English countryside after a nervous breakdown.  It seems that during his torrid affair with a local woman (Saffron Burrows) he may have gone off his rocker, and now she’s gone missing.  Jericho suspects foul play and enlists Burrows’s reluctant roommate, played plump and near-sighted by Kate Winslet, to help him.  Soon both are under the watchful eye of a British agent.  All this, while German U-boats are sending encoded messages about their attempts to hunt Allied supply ships in the Atlantic… As Jericho and the British agent, “Enigma” stars Jeremy Northam of “An Ideal Husband” and Dougray Scott of “Mission: Impossible 2.”  Conventional wisdom would put the dapper Northam in the role of the intellectual and hardened tough guy Scott in the spy role, but “Enigma” reverses our expectations.  As the lovesick mathematician, Scott is just as wet-eyed and teeth-gnashing as he was in “MI2,” but here he is also gaunt, wiry, and stooped.  As the secret agent, Northam is wonderfully nonchalant about spying.  Soft-voiced and tasteful, Northam also effortlessly conveys a sense of a steeled backbone beneath everything he does. The romance and the spying go hand-in-hand.  By all appearances, Jericho has simply fallen for a tart who just wanted a good time.  But what if she were a spy?  When they were intimate, she demanded to see something secret of his—but isn’t that what love is, a sharing of secrets?  Jericho’s search into her past is, of course, a matter of national importance, but isn’t it also a matter of the heart, to catch her and demand, what did I mean to you, and how could you hurt me like this? Along the way we are shown the day-to-day work that goes into breaking codes.  Conveniently for us, Jericho’s investigation doubles as a tour of everything we need to know about how the codes are received, who receives them, and who files them.  We realize that an entire community has grown up around these radio towers, complete with food, housing, and recreation. As if making a spy movie without silencers or infra-red cameras weren’t un-trendy enough, director Michael Apted (“Thunderheart”) and screenwriter Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”) have paced “Enigma” more like an arthouse movie than a thriller.  They freely and liesurely turn their focus on the remembrance of a time-and-place that is gone (wartime England, specifically the codebreaking community), including tangents about rationing, fashions, and other living conditions of the time.  Apted has also cheerfully included several old standards of World War II movies from days gone by, including giant maps showing the movement of fleets, and American officers clearly played by British actors. My only real complaint with “Enigma” is how much time is spent showing us the romance between Dougray and Saffron.  In many ways it is the crucial relationship of the film, but the specifics of what they say and where they meet are not as remarkable as the filmmakers think they are.  Using fewer flashbacks would have set the tone of young, hopeless love, and everyone who’s ever had one of those could fill in the gaps just fine.  And when you can fill in a movie’s gaps, instead of the movie filling them in for you, that tends to make the film more intimate, as if the two of you have become entwined.  Still, it is a small complaint for a satisfying, elegant little film. Finished October 8, 2003 Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night                                                                                                          Back to home.