Imagine this: One picturesque morning a man wakes to the sight of his girlfriend, radiant and wearing his shirt, digging around at the foot of his bed. He asks what she’s doing; she replies, matter-of-factly, “Going through your things.” He is disturbed by this, and asks her back to bed. She discovers a folded piece of paper, something he’s been working on. She puts it into her purse. She wants something of his to keep, she says.

Tom: “Give it back.”

Claire: “Why?”

Tom: “Because it means nothing to you, and a lot to me.”

She giggles and hides the paper, and he is angry. He takes it from her forcefully. This marks the end of their relationship; in a series of flashbacks, she leaves him. He pursues, and each time he catches up to her, she leaves him again and again. “Poor you,” she says when he catches up to her for the last time. “I really got under your skin, didn’t I.” She looks genuinely sorry for him.

Enigma is, in broad strokes, the story of the cryptographers responsible for the breaking of the German Enigma machine’s codes during World War II. In finer strokes, it is the story of Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), who has been left heartbroken by a woman who subsequently goes missing, and who embarks on a desperate journey to find her.

It is a movie built on what has gone before, and as such, liberally employs flashbacks to tell its story. As it opens, Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park, home of the British cryptographers. His train ride is spliced with a similar train ride of long ago, rich with memories of Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), the woman who left him. We learn that he has been away from Bletchley for some time, sent away to ‘rest’ after his failed love affair drove him to a nervous breakdown. In his flashbacks, Jericho glows; in the present, he is gaunt, unshaven, red-eyed. He does not look like a man recovered.

His return to Bletchley has been requested by the head of the cryptography team. The Germans have changed their Enigma code, and the safety of three American convoys laden with supplies for Allied troops is at risk. Jericho is something of a genius, and probably Bletchley’s best hope for breaking the new code in time to protect the convoys. These efforts are complicated by two things: Claire’s disappearance, for which Jericho enlists the assistance of Claire’s roommate, Hester (Kate Winslet), to solve; and the snooping about of a dapper chap named Wigram (Jeremy Northam), who suspects that there’s a spy in Bletchley park.

Enigma is based on a novel by Robert Harris, whose work I’m unfamiliar with. The book was adapted by Tom Stoppard, who has a diverse resume (Brazil, Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love). The movie is extremely well-scripted; the use of flashbacks never grows tiresome, and is often nail-bitingly suspenseful. Time is one thing these characters have very, very little of. Stoppard’s sharp dialogue never lets you forget it.

Tom: “Enigma is a very sophisticated enciphering machine, and Shark is its ultimate refinement. So we’re not talking about the Times crossword here. It weighs twenty-six pounds, battery included, and goes anywhere. The Enigma machine — the Germans have thousands of them.”

Hammerbeck: “What’s it do?”

Tom: “It turns plaintext messages into gobbledygook. Then the gobbledygook is transmitted in Morse. At the other end is another Enigma machine, which translates the message back to the original text.”

Hammerbeck: “And you have one of your own. So what’s the problem?”

Tom: “The problem? The problem is the machine has a hundred and fifty million million million ways of doing it, according to how you set these three rotors, and how you connect these plugs. Press the same key any number of times. It’ll always come out different.”

Hammerbeck: “And that’s Shark?”

Tom: “No. No, no, no, this is the one we can break. Shark is enciphered on a special Enigma machine with a fourth rotor, designed especially for U-boats — which gives it about four thousand million billion starting positions. And, uh… we’ve never seen one.”

Hammerbeck: “Holy shit.”

Until Enigma, I’d never really thought much of Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam or Dougray Scott. I don’t mean that I thought they were awful actors; I just never gave them much thought one way or the other. It’s impossible to look at them quite the same way after seeing Enigma. Scott’s Tom Jericho is a husk of a man who is never far from a painful reminder of his missing lover; he is an obsessive wreck who communicates heartbreak with every step, and yet it’s never over-the-top. Conversely, Northam is a compulsively snappy dresser who knows everything that you don’t. His Wigram is charming, arrogant, and amusingly pretentious. Winslet, as the frumpy and bright Hester, gets to play a rare subdued role.

More inescapable than the performances is the movie’s original score, which is easily one of my favorites of the past five years. Composed by John Barry (Dances With Wolves, Out of Africa), the score employs a simple theme so versatile that a slight shift in tone can change it from wistful to menacing, from melancholy to exuberant. Barry’s music and Seamus McGarvey’s beautiful and almost vintage-looking cinematography collaborate to give the picture an old-school sensibility. Enigma could just as easily have been filmed thirty years ago, or fifty.

If there are any weaknesses to be found, then they can be found in the movie’s multiple storylines, which sometimes are difficult to track. But they’re offset by flashbacks so effective, and performances so compelling, that it’s hard to dismiss the intersecting plots and subplots as sleight-of-hand.

Friday, June 23, 2006   

1. Mac Hayes wrote:
   October 7th, 2006 at 2:29 pm

   Today’s actors amaze me wih their talents, and the actors in Enigma are no exception.
   All facets of this movie were well acted out, even the Admiral’s assistants at his car.
   The mark of a quality performance of an actor is his or her ability to get the audience to either love or hate his character. This was readily evident in Enigma. As Hester said, “Braaaaavo, Mr. Jericho!!”

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea