Enigma (2001)

Simply Perfect

Fantastic!

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

In 1995 the British declassified Station X, the ultra-secret WWII Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, 50 miles from London. In 1999, the BBC aired a 4-part documentary about Station X. I first learned about Alan Turing when Nova (the American equivalent of the BBC's Horizon) aired a version of "Station X" cut down to a single 2-hour episode. "Enigma" was released in 2001, well before the present surge of general interest in Bletchley Park and Turing's extraordinary life that has given us "The Imitation Game" (December 2014). Back then it must have been easier to create a fictitious character (Tom Jericho) based on Turing, the eccentric, painfully socially awkward mathematical genius who was one of the stars of Station X. Unfortunately, "Enigma" isn't spectacular even if you don't know anything about Alan Turing. The plot: In March of 1943, codebreakers at Station X discover to their horror that the German navy has changed the code sets used to communicate with U-boats at sea. These were based on the famous and diabolically complex encryption machine known as the Enigma. (That actually happened.) Authorities enlist the help of a brilliant young mathematician, one Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) to help them, as they put it, find their way back into the code. The possibility of a spy in Station X uis raised, and Tom's love interest, Claire (the 6-foot-tall Saffron Burrows), has disappeared. To solve these mysteries, Tom recruits Claire's best friend, Hester Wallace (based on the historical person Joan Clarke and played by Kate Winslet). While investigating Claire's personal life, the pair discover personal and international betrayals involving the now-infamous Katyn massacre in Poland. Of course, Tom and Hester fall in love. Dougray Scott actually looks more like Alan Turing than does Benedict Cumberbatch ("The Imitation Game"), but there the resemblance to Turing mostly ends. Turing's sorry, shabby reward for the instrumental role he played in winning the war for Britain was to be persecuted during the Cold War because his homosexuality was viewed as a security risk. He committed suicide at the age of 41. Tom Jericho is most assuredly NOT homosexual, nor is he borderline autistic, which is how Turing is played by Cumberbatch.The film does well something that had not been done before, namely to recreate the physical setting at wartime Bletchley Park, especially the Enigma machines themselves and the now-famous decrypting machines Turing invented, the "Bombes."While "Enigma" looks good and plays fairly well as an espionage yarn, the viewer who knows the factual background of this piece of fiction will be dissatisfied. It is surprising that this rather wan film is the work of Tom Stoppard and Michael Apted; they have done better.

I'm absolutely shocked by the story. Indeed, one fact trouble me. The story of Bukowski who lost his brother in Katyń. Then, he started to work with Germans. It is such a pity that the director or maybe the scenarist is a such a big ignorant in history. How he can imagine that a brother of polish officer could be a traitor? Because, if he really worked with Germans he would be automatically condemmned to the dead by the polish government which resided in England. The authority of this government was very strong during the Second War and it is imaginable that a brother of the hero could became a traitor. Because, in this times each collaborator was a traitor and the most of them were judged and condemmned to the dead, even women. And people in Poland was very aware of the Nazi. So, the personality of Bukowski was it's very offensive for Katyń's families. If he wanted a person of polish traitor he could search among the folksdeutchs, but not among a Polish subordinate to the polish temporary government in London. But, maybe it it would be to match for his limited mind.

The British cinema produced so many war films in the forties, fifties and sixties that one might have thought that the supply of suitable subjects would have dried up, and indeed such films have, since around 1970, not been as popular as they once were. Film-makers do, however, occasionally succeed in finding new wartime subjects, and "Enigma" is one such example. It is a fictitious account of the work of the British code-breakers based at Bletchley Park. The story is set in March 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height and the key priority for the code-breakers was to crack the "shark" cipher used by the German Navy to communicate with its U-Boats. (The title derives from the Enigma machines used by the Nazis to encode messages).The main character is cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, a brilliant but eccentric Cambridge mathematician loosely based on Alan Turing. As the film opens, Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park after recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork and an unhappy love affair. Jericho's former lover Claire has mysteriously gone missing, and he enlists the help of her housemate Hester to try and track her down. In the course of their search they discover that she was responsible for the theft of classified documents and begin to suspect that she might have been working for the Germans.The film has been criticised on two counts. One is that it does not mention Turing's vital work in cracking the code, replacing him with the fictional Jericho. This may have been down to financial considerations; Turing was gay whereas Jericho is heterosexual, and the filmmakers may have felt that a film with a gay hero would not do well at the box-office. On the other hand, they may simply have wanted to remain faithful to Robert Harris' source novel. The other commonly voiced criticism was of the storyline in which the real traitor turns out to be a Pole who is betraying Allied military secrets to the Nazis because of anger over the Katyn massacre in which his brother died. This also struck me as an unlikely development; the German occupation of Poland was so brutal that no Pole, however great his resentment of Stalin, would have been likely to have collaborated with the Nazis. In actual fact, there were no known German agents working at Bletchley Park; the only spy there was the notorious John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge spy ring, who was working for the Soviet Union, not Germany.Dougray Scott is good as Jericho, a seedy, slightly unbalanced genius, and Jeremy Northam is also good as the suave but sinister upper-class MI5 agent Wigram. This is not, however, really one of Kate Winslet's better films, and she seems miscast as the plain, dowdy bluestocking Hester. She may have taken the role under the influence of the belief, common in the early 2000s, that a physically attractive actress will not be taken seriously in her profession unless she has made at least one film in which she plays a physically unattractive character. (See also Charlize Theron in "Monster" or Nicole Kidman in "The Hours").The plot, as is usual with spy thrillers, is a highly complex one, and at times difficult to follow. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, may be one of Britain's greatest playwrights, but I find that his talents often work better in the theatre than in the cinema. "Enigma" does, however, succeed in conveying a good sense of the atmosphere of wartime Britain, a mixture of fear, paranoia about the enemy and patriotic enthusiasm. 6/10

Recently came across this movie when it was being shown in sony pix. Got hooked immediately. The lead couple played by Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott provide excellent acting in a well written movie honoring the code breakers of Enigma. The setting is of Bletchley and the scenery in the movie is quite beautiful. Dougray as the mathematician plays the role perfectly as the genius gone crazy over a blonde. Kate Winslet (wears glasses, which is funny) provides excellent support. The security officer also provides good support and rest of the cast reflects the English of 1940's. Although the movie is great on acting and other fronts,the thrill in the story is little less. A more of a thinking based movie rather than pure thriller.