Enigma (2002) is just the kind of movie I’d like, but I found it flat and, ultimately, forgettable, I suppose. Here we’ve got a first-rate director, Michael Apted, and a veteran screenwriter, Tom Stoppard. And we’ve got British actors with lots of chops. Great. All stewed up in World War II suspense based on a true story of code breaking and espionage.
Even though I love complex movies, I had to stop this one half a dozen times and make sure I was following the plot. The mystery underlying the particular breach in security at the heart of Enigma is so remote that viewers have no chance of figuring it out. Apted and Stoppard may argue that they gave us a hint early in the movie when a dog runs through the woods and stops and digs up a human arm. This brief and inexplicable scene would have helped if we had known that forest was in Poland and the time was shortly after WW II.
But then the complexity gets another dimension when the femme fatale plot develops. Is the gorgeous, seductive Claire (Saffron Burrows) a German spy? Is she being blackmailed? Is she actually an assistant to the slimy detective Wigram (Jeremy Northam)? Or did the woman who slept with half of the decoding department finally fall in love with someone? You’ll have to sort all that out without any help from the other characters in the movie because they don’t know most of the time either. At the same time you’ll be learning how coding and code breaking works. Hopefully, you have enough history background that you don’t have to learn the WW II context as well.
Maybe because the film is so cerebral, Apted et al. have put in a few scenes apparently intended to get a visceral reaction. But they are poorly done and don’t work. The car chase is almost amateurish. The escape from a train could have been exciting—think of how Hitchcock might have done it—but the bad guy gets up, walks down the corridor, and disappears. Even the budding romance between the hero, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) and his assistant sleuth, Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet) has no passion. Sure they are both brains, but geniuses can be passionate, and that would have added some juice.
Still you get great acting—Dougray Scott is particularly good as the brain recovering from a nervous break down; Kate Winslet is solid; Saffron Burrows is perfect for the femme fatale role, never over-playing her hand. And you’ve got the authentic setting and wonderful recreations of the 1940s. So if it sounds intriguing, go for it, but have your thumb poised above the pause and rewind buttons.