Weak at the knees
There comes a point in Michael Apted's Enigma -- more
than one, actually -- where Jeremy Northam shows up and you feel
grateful. At these moments, the film, which is mostly a plotty
and deeply self-admiring tale about British code-breakers during
WWII, turns funny, even witty. This shift is a function of
Northam's wholly refreshing incongruity. It's as if he's acting
in another movie, quite different from the one in which everyone
else is trundling about.
Much of this trundling takes place in Bletchley Park, a.k.a.
Station X, a top secret site outside London where all varieties
of nerds, Bolsheviks, and math whizzes work at breaking down
German communications, including those encoded by the famous
Enigma machine (one of which is kept in a glass case at
Bletchley, after having been captured during a battle). Most of
the British workers are dedicated to national service, and a few
are competitive with each other as well as the Nazis. For the
most part, though, Bletchley Park is like a camp for eggheads --
they live in dorm rooms, ride their bicycles to work, take tea
in a cafeteria, and answer to stuffy headmaster-types.
On some level, Enigma, scripted by Tom Stoppard and
based on a novel by Robert Harris, is less about the war, then,
than it is about the tensions and suspicions that war breeds at
home. This is where Northam comes in, as he plays an interloper
to the Bletchley Park community, a secret service agent named
Wigram, looking into the recent disappearance of a lovely young
code-recorder, Claire (Saffron Burrows). His questions make
people nervous, though they all rather suspect that Claire ran
off with a lover -- she was "loose," as suggested in flashbacks,
in which she dances in her slip, smokes cigarettes, and wears
seamed stockings.
Wigram's investigation appears to be focused on the most gifted
decoder- guy, a heroically monikered Cambridge mathematician,
Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott). Seems that Tom is just returning
from a leave of absence -- quite against a sniffy superior's
better judgment -- because the Germans have cooked up a new,
apparently unbreakable code, and by gosh, he's the best breaker
the Brits have got. The official story attending Tom's return is
that his previous work with a horrendously difficult code system
called Shark drove him over the edge. But Wigram has other
ideas, namely, that Tom had a disastrous romance with Claire and
collapsed when she rejected him. He smiles, "It wasn't really
Shark that made you crazy, was it?" Tom blanches.
Several flashbacks suggest that this rejection scene was fairly
operatic, that Tom wailed a bit, that Claire marched away over a
(could it be symbolic?) bridge, teetering on her high heels. If
you believe some of these flashbacks -- which you are by no
means compelled to do, this being a Stoppard script, full of
disingenuous cues -- even offering to leak secret info to her,
so as to prove his worthiness. In other words, Tom is a bit of a
wonky guy, undone by his first full-fledged love affair.
But it soon becomes clear that Wigram isn't exactly wed to his
conjecture that Tom shot his info-wad while in a romantic panic
(though he does mock Tom mercilessly, observing of his
"glamorous" job that "Girls go weak at the knees at the thought
of the size of your brains!"). Maybe, Wigram suggests, Tom had a
hand in Claire's demise -- if she is so demised. Or perchance
she was a spy and willfully used Tom. Dear Wigram is full
of potential interpretations of the meager the meager facts (no
body, no evidence of foul play, no obvious information leakage
to the Germans), and he often seems quite unconcerned which one
is correct. He's more the Columbo-sort of investigator who lets
fly with theories to see where they land and whom they upset.
Given that Tom is so easily upsettable at this time (he sees no
humor in Claire's vanishing, because he imagines that she's run
off with another fellow), he makes a good target. And Wigram
makes the most of his discomfort, perhaps because he believes
Tom guilty, perhaps because he just likes to torment him. Wigram
is poised and Tom is sooo pasty.
Distressingly, Wigram actually isn't around very much; maybe he
has other movies to disrupt. Fortunately, Claire's roommate
Hester (Kate Winslet) is still working at Bletchley, and though
she's not quite the firecracker that Claire is in Tom's
flashbacks (wearing seamed stockings, dancing in her slip,
drinking and generally causing trouble), she's certainly a live
wire compared to Tom. Hester's energy alternates between Girl
Detective Overdrive and a subtler, more mature insightfulness,
but before you think too highly of her, consider that she
develops an inexplicable affection for Tom. This means that
Enigma dallies with their imminent romance, which, while
not especially surprising, is sometimes appealingly awkward, and
Winslet is, as ever, undauntable.
Amid all this melodrama, the immediate, pseudo-historical
crisis almost gets lost: Tom's current mission has to do with a
fleet of Allied merchant ships, carrying some 10,000 passengers,
that are headed directly into enemy U boat territory (apparently
the code-crackers really missed their buddy Tom). He and
his fellows must figure out what the Germans are planning, save
the ships, and discover the presumed spy in the Bletchley ranks.
And oh yes, if he has a minute, in between his painful and
inconsistent flashbacks of Claire, he means to track her down as
well. They're not quite able to do all these things, but you can
be sure that Tom gets to the bottom of the Claire mystery.
But while Tom spends much of the film being depressed,
obsessive, and annoyingly schoolboyish, Hester never quite gives
in to his lack of spunk, eventually rousing him to some
semblance of action. Though he doesn't precisely launch into Tom
Clancy-sized heroics, though he does a bit of improbable leaping
and gallivanting by film's end. Thankfully, Wigram makes yet
another illogical and self-loving appearance, adroitly and
enjoyably undermining Tom's big adventure.
— 9 May 2002
