Workmanlike retelling of WWII deception success
Operation Mincemeat, so the film tells us, was the most spectacular success in the whole history of deception. Almost inevitably, the film itself is far from being the most spectacular success in the whole history of cinema.
It’s a workmanlike production which builds nicely in the first half, goes just a little off the boil in the second when the tension should be at its greatest before rallying for a rousing conclusion complete with a succession of typed credits telling us what happened next to all concerned.
Whether it has done full justice to a truly remarkable story, the answer, sadly, is probably not – for all it is a film which is enjoyable, largely absorbing and certainly well acted.
Operation Mincemeat was a 1943 Allied piece of derring-do, an audacious plan to hoodwink Hitler which worked precisely because it was so very, very audacious. Given events thus far in the war, it was obvious to everyone that the Allies’ next step would be to invade Sicily. Therefore it became crucial to persuade the Germans that – rather surprisingly – the invasion target was going to be Greece. And to that end a truly outrageous plan was hatched, namely to drop a dead body into the sea off Spain, with the corpse attached to a brief case containing a hugely
“top secret” letter causally betraying that Greece was the true target (which, of course, it wasn’t).
The film is at its best in the first half as an unlikely foursome – Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, Kelly Macdonald as Jean Leslie and Penelope Wilton as Hester Leggett – construct a plausible backstory for their corpse whom they name “Major William Martin”, in fact the body of a vagrant who died after ingesting rat poison, knowingly or accidentally. They invent Major Martin’s world from scratch including a girlfriend loosely based on Jean. And in doing so, Montagu and Jean are drawn ever closer while Cholmondeley looks on with treacherous jealousy. This is where the film really succeeds.
After they launch the body, hoping that the Spanish authorities will hand over the corpse while letting the Germans have a look at the documents, the film oddly dips. Everyone is waiting for the confirmation that the Germans have swallowed Mincemeat. Instead we get Spaniards playing things annoyingly by the book and double agents turning triple in an efforts to get them to do the decent thing and give the bait to the Germans.
This is where the film ought to be at its most gripping – and sadly it isn’t. All sorts of murky meetings are going on in Spain in an effort to get those unreliable Spaniards to snitch to the Nazis. History, of course, tells us that they did – and the fact that they did meant that the invasion of Sicily met minimal resistance. Operation Mincemeat saved tens of thousands of lives and undoubtedly shortened the war, and at the end the film refinds its frisson – though as with all films based on real life, you do wander away wondering just where the film makers have attempted to make a good story even better, just where historical truth gives to way dramatic speculation.