Hmmm. Enigma. I really think I might have been out of my depth, as a lot of this passed me by. Set in Bletchley Park, it begins with the return of Tom Jericho, the star code-cracker who left under a cloud, sent insane by exhaustion and a failed love affair with the park�s beauty, Claire.
Except Claire has gone missing, and he enlists the help of her friend Hester (Winslet) to help find her. Following them around and generally being annoying is Wigram, some kind of detective. Claire�s disappearance leads Jericho to suspect espionage � as you do. After an obsessive search of her room, Jericho finds a set of codes that she shouldn�t have and goes about finding their origins.
At the same time, Bletchley is on high alert because of a threat to an enormous convoy being sent over from America. The code-breakers are needed to break a fiendish new code. Meanwhile Hester is going about stealing files and sorting out the mystery of Claire�s set of codes. Hester�s character, a dumpy bluestocking, was by far the most interesting of the bunch and was well played by Kate Winslet. She was given some great lines but she should have been exploited more to escape the stereotype.
Every scene seemed to produce a new revelation and left me floundering brainlessly. I�m crap at mysteries, though, so that hardly qualifies as a complaint. The complexity of the story will be highly satisfying to anyone with a few more brain cells than me.
The treatment of the convoy story was hyperbolic, considering that heavy convoy losses were the norm for the best part of WWII, and I�d have been happy to see more code-cracking scenes than all this running around in fields that Hester and Jericho seemed to be doing, especially as it all ends up being a bit of a waste of time. Still, seeing as I�ll probably be the last on Bletchley�s call-up list, I can hardly criticise. |
