Enigma Reviews

An awkward combination of wartime drama and obsessive romance, this old-fashioned thriller — based on Robert Harris's novel — unfolds in WWII England amid the rarefied world of military code breakers. There are actually two enigmas: The invaluable German encryption machine captured by British sailors (not Americans, as 2000's U-571 suggests), and glamorous Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows). 1943, Bletchley Park: Code breaker Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) returns to Bletchley, Britain's famous cryptanalytic station, following a nervous breakdown precipitated by his affair with Claire, who's vanished during his absence. Brilliant and high-strung, Jericho broke the Enigma code system, allowing British spies to eavesdrop on Nazi naval transmissions, and devised a "thinking machine" (a forerunner of modern-day computers) which, in conjunction with a captured source book, allows Allied cryptographers to keep up with daily changes in the coded transmissions. But the Nazis have suddenly switched source books, sending the cipher sleuths back to square one just as three marine convoys leave New York for London, steaming into an Atlantic crawling with German submarines. Adding to the pressure, sleek British Intelligence agent Wigram (Jeremy Northam) is convinced there's a leak within Bletchley Park, and seems to think Claire is the key. With the help of Claire's dowdy but whip-smart roommate, Hester (Kate Winslet, whose real-life pregnancy gave her a convincingly dumpy look), Jericho sets out to learn the dangerous beauty's fate. Did she stumble onto some deadly secret? Is — or was? — she a traitor? Bletchley Park's real-life code breakers went unlauded until the '70s, when declassified details of their wartime service revealed that WWII espionage was more the purview of number nerds and crossword puzzle twerps than glamorous spies in the James Bond mold. Harris's thriller is a clever entertainment that uses history as a jumping-off point without being constrained by its details (Jericho, for example, was almost certainly inspired by mathematician Alan Turing, but the particulars of his character are entirely fictitious) but screenwriter Tom Stoppard's adaptation is surprisingly clunky. Given his way with witty banter, Stoppard's obvious, even leaden, dialogue is especially disappointing; director Michael Apted's handling of the story's frequent flashbacks is equally infelicitous. But the film's small pleasures include its thorough disinterest in macho heroics and things blowing up, Northam's slyly insinuating performance and the presence of a plain-jane heroine who isn't miraculously transformed into a knockout when she removes her glasses and lets down her hair.