Enigma
*
Cinema
Releases - September 28, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 117
minutes. Directed by Michael Apted. Written by Tom Stoppard; from the novel
by Thomas Harris. Starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron
Burrows.
"Enigma" is a wretched movie that
reduces the Second World War to one man's quest to find an old flame. It
also reduces Kate Winslet, one of our finest screen actresses, to the role
of sidekick of the unlikeable hero. Right there are two abominable crimes
that should each count as a crime and a half, so let's enforce the three-strikes
law and stick this movie on the electric chair.
Based on a Robert Harris best seller, the film
vaguely involves the use of the Enigma code-breaking machine, which was an
instrumental part of the Allied campaign. In the opening scenes we learn
that the Nazis have changed their codebook, so it's up to a British mathematician
(Dougray Scott) to work out the new system.
Winslet plays a lower-ranking intelligence worker
assisting Scott in his efforts; her roommate, played in flashback scenes
by Saffron Burrows, was having an affair with Scott last time he was working
in the area, but now the roommate is missing and our protagonists find evidence
suggesting that something fishy was going on with her -- links to German
spies, or maybe just unfortunate connections.
The Scott character's pathetic obsession with
Burrows takes over the whole movie -- elegiac memories of their romance punctuate
an interminable string of scenes in which Scott raves about how wonderful
his lady was, declares how she couldn't have been involved in anything
treacherous, searches for clues regarding her whereabouts and defends her
honour by punching out colleagues. This little story is so irrelevant in
the face of everything going on around it, and Scott plays such a geeky loser,
that "Enigma" had me disgusted from the beginning.
There are other problems. When the movie does
get around to dealing with something at all focused, it does so in a manner
that first surrounds us in technical jargon and then seems to make no sense.
Intelligence personnel sit around reading coordinates and declaring how they've
lost a fleet of ships that are about to sail into enemy waters, but after
they realise that the inevitable loss of those ships can be used to their
advantage, they sit around tracking the ships' movements on radar. Either
there's a huge inconsistency on show or incompetent filmmaking is confusing
us.
I remember when this project was in pre-production,
and we were told that it would be a truer version of "U-571", last year's
terrible action movie that featured hours of boring submarine footage and
gave America credit for the British mission to capture the German code machine.
Despite being directed by Michael Apted, one of the great British directors,
"Enigma" doesn't even attempt to live up to its promise.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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