During
World War II British cryptographers at Blentchly Park, a manorial
estate some sixty miles north of London, decoded German communications
and saved thousands of lives, though their efforts were kept
secret until 1975. In Enigma, directed by Michael
Apted, those involved in codebreaking are honored through
a combination love story and spy story, a fictional genre
popular during the war which the film, based on Robert Harris's
1995 novel, revives. When the movie begins, in 1943, the largest
convoy ever of civilian and military supplies is being shipped
across the U-Boat-invested Atlantic from the United States
to Britain, with some supplies also headed for the Soviet
Union. An American officer arrives at Blentchly to obtain
assurances that the convoy will travel unimpeded; he assumes
that codebreakers can determine where the German submarines
are located, enabling them to bypass danger. However, the
American officer is not pleased when even the top British
codebreaker, Cambridge mathematician Tom Jericho (played by
Dougray Scott), gives no such guarantee and can only promise
to work on the problem. Unfortunately, German cryptographers
are using a very sophisticated code that changes daily, so
the likelihood of cracking the code seems remote. As the film
demonstrates, the process of codebreaking starts with Morse
code signals from German sources; the signals are recorded
by female telegraph receivers and transmitted to the coderoom,
where male codebreakers try to find a pattern, which in turn
is relayed to a machine that is a precursor of a giant computer
that prints out a message that may or may not be interpretable.
Since the operation is top secret, Wigram (played by Jeremy
Northam) keeps a watchful eye on the personnel, employing
a female counterspy to find possible leaks. Earlier, Tom fell
in love with an employee at Blentchly, Claire Romilly (played
by Saffron Burrows), who slept with him and then "moved
on" to her next boyfriend, leaving Tom so disconsolate
that he has been hospitalized due to a nervous breakdown.
Nevertheless, the new challenge mobilizes Tom to work to crack
the German code with the aid of a codebook and a special Enigma
machine, precursor of a laptop computer. When Claire's roommate,
Hester Wallace (played by Kate Winslet), informs Tom that
Claire is missing, he tries to track her down while trying
to crack the code. With Hester's help, they purloin files
and crack a code that contains a text that lists the names
some 4,000 Polish men. They infer that the Germans are cataloguing
the names of Poles who were slaughtered by the Russians in
the Katyn Massacre, a fact that if revealed might erode the
wartime alliance between the Allies and the Soviet Union.
Evidently because of the Katyn Massacre, British codebreaker
"Puck" Pukowski (played by Nickolaj Coster-Waldau)
secretly agrees to become a Nazi spy, and arranges to join
a U-Boat off the coast of Scotland, carrying the secret that
the British have Enigma. "Puck" was also the latest
of Claire's lovers, so Jericho suspects that he killed Claire,
and he and follows Puck to Scotland, unaware of the latter's
intent to defect. The climax of the film thus involves a dramatic
showdown. In the epilog, Tom and Hester, now pregnant with
their child, enter St. Martin's Church for a music concert.
Titles at the end honor the work at Blentchly Park, now a
museum, note that the Soviet Union did not accept responsibility
for the Katyn Massacre until Mikhail Gorbachev did so in 1990,
but fail to give credit to Alan Turing, the actual genius
of Blentchly Park, and the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski,
who cracked the Enigma code in 1932 and passed along the results
of his research to the British in 1939. Nevertheless, as a
film that brings new facts to the screen, the Political Film
Society has nominated Enigma for
an award as best film expose of 2002. MH
I
want to comment on this film
