Operation Mincemeat delivers an intriguing espionage thriller with classic British restraint
Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen star in John Madden's engaging spy drama, based on improbable real-life events
Film Reviews Operation Mincemeat
Operation Mincemeat, a richly engaging World War II spy drama from director John Madden, opens with voiceover narration which asserts that a good story contains that which is seen, and also that which is hidden. Over the course of two-plus hours, the film then proceeds to both illustrate that axiom and excavate its deeper truths.
Based on fascinatingly improbable real-life events, the film has enough cloak-and-dagger intrigue and period detail to satisfy the type of hardcore sub-genre enthusiasts who made the exhaustive, 39-volume Time Life Books series on World War II a perennial Father’s Day gift. But it’s also shot through with a humanizing sense of uncertainty, moral complication, and even wistfulness about the manner in which this work weighs upon its practitioners, for an altogether rewarding experience even for those viewers who traditionally eschew wartime dramas.
In early 1943, as Allied forces weigh a plan to splinter Axis power and break Adolf Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe, they struggle with a formidable challenge. A frontal assault on Sicily makes the most sense, but is also the most obvious. Aiming to mitigate casualties, the “Twenty Committee,” a special British interdepartmental intelligence team, undertakes a disinformation campaign. Their aim is to make Germany and Italy believe that the Allied point-of-attack is actually Greece, and redirect some of their forces accordingly.
As part of this strategy, intelligence officers Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) seize upon a throwaway detail in an old war memo credited to their superior, Admiral John Godfrey (Jason Isaacs), and championed by outside-of-the-box thinker and aspiring novelist Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn). The idea, self-admittedly cribbed from Basil Thomson’s The Milliner’s Hat, is to plant misleading military documents on a dead soldier’s body in order to fool the Nazis.
Despite the fact that Godfrey doesn’t have much faith in the ruse, the aforementioned pair is tasked with implementing it and, abetted by Fleming, they set about breathing life into the plan. Ewen and Charles start by obtaining the body of a recently deceased homeless man, then construct an elaborate personal history for the newly named Captain William Martin. Months of meticulous work culminate with his placement off the coast of Huelva in southern Spain, an ideal spot for a variety of reasons. From there, an entirely separate game unfolds, trying to make certain the corresponding phony documents find their way into the hands of German agents.
All this espionage plotting and narrative density recall Firth’s 2011 Cold War-era spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Like that film, Operation Mincemeat is a well-crafted project which invites audiences to sink into the enveloping procedural crevasses of its story. Based on the same-titled book by Ben Macintyre and adapted for the screen by Michelle Ashford, the script is a marvel of condensed structure, artfully channeling bureaucratic and political machinations through compelling characters. More importantly, though, there’s a certain elegiac quality that hangs over the entire movie without overshadowing or suffocating its thriller elements.
The basic story here (previously adapted in 1956’s The Man Who Never Was, starring Clifton Webb, as well as a recent stage show) would be easy to sell on merely its more outlandish elements and its many feints. But in the hands of Ashford, the creator of Masters of Sex and also Emmy-nominated for The Pacific, it becomes something more deeply considered.
The character of Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), an MI5 clerk who provides a sweetheart photograph for the fictitious Martin and then uses that to become more involved in the plot, at first seems a questionable or distracting inclusion to an already unlikely story. Ashford, however, develops Leslie in order to plumb all of the surrounding characters with greater insight. She establishes a sort of love triangle between Ewen, Jean, and Charles, creating tension without ever yielding to the consummation that would really qualify the movie as a romantic drama. Ewen, a Jew whose family has been sent off to America, develops a strong bond with the widowed Jean, who returns the depth of his feelings. The somewhat hapless Charles, meanwhile, working in secret and living with a mother who pines for his war hero brother, nurses an unrequited crush on Jean. The way in which these characters go about collectively building this backstory of “Bill and Pam,” waxing romantic about a wholly constructed love affair, deepens their characterizations in an affecting manner that intensifies the story overall.
Ashford also doesn’t shy away from the story’s inherent absurdity, despite the gravity of its stakes. She allows for gallows humor, taking special delight in concocting a sequence in which Godfrey tortures his charges for a letter-perfect rewrite on staid military correspondence. She also folds in a number of Easter eggs (Fleming is rumored to have actually written part of Godfrey’s initial, so-called “Trout Memo”) which will elicit amused smiles from James Bond fans.
British director Madden remains best known Stateside for helming the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. But despite a filmography studded with plenty of movies of the sort which are most stereotypically associated with English filmmakers, he also knows his way around both this specific time and place (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) and political thrillers more generally (The Debt). Working in lockstep fashion with cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov and editor Victoria Boydell, Madden crafts an unassuming, attractive-looking film which feels at once tidy and expansive, manicured and propulsive. His assurance and deft touch with the film’s counterintelligence plotting—which comes to a head in a third act featuring double or sometimes triple agents—are atypical among peers, many of whom would feel the need to adopt a more aggressive visual style.
The movie’s performances also fit together quite appealingly. Isaacs’ unwelcoming, perturbed demeanor seems to feed perfectly into Firth’s buttoned-up straightforwardness, giving Godfrey’s suspicion that Ewen’s eccentric, Communist-sympathizing younger brother Ivor (Mark Gatiss) is a Russian spy a layer of parallel intrigue. Macfadyen imbues Charles with a poignant sadness, while Macdonald similarly conveys an expanse of tangled, private feelings. Together, this core trio provides Operation Mincemeat with a sense of enlivened history, and show that a strong sense of duty need not be a shiny, uncomplicated thing—that it can be weighted with all types of ambiguities, differently colored motivations and, yes, regrets.
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Always nice when a movie you were going to watch anyway gets a great review.
My easy chair is gonna get a fucking workout with this one.
The only people I know who have seen it said it was OK, but not as good as the original. [it’s kind of weird the review doesn’t make any comparisons directly, given how well known the original is]
Some other suggestions for people interested in this subject (though completely fictional):36 Hours: Real life WW2 flying ace Roald Dahl writes the story of a pilot who’s captured by the Germans and subjected to a complicated ruse that the war is long over and he’s suffering from anterograde amnesia in an American hospital, so he’ll talk about where the D-Day invasion will happen. This eventually turns into a quite evenly matched cat and mouse that’s quite unpredictable considering we know full well what will happen.Eye of the Needle: Based on Ken Follett’s breakthrough novel and directed by the sadly short-lived Richard Marquand just before Return of the Jedi, an elite German assassin discovers the whole truth of Operation Mincemeat but circumstances stick him on an island with a bitter would-be British officer who lost his legs in a car accident, and his seemingly helpless wife. Very much a “When will the sheer horribleness of a character get you past how cool and fun he is?” story in the Breaking Bad mold.
One of my favourite WW2 non-fiction books is Dynamo: Defending The Honour Of Kiev*, detailing the story of the football team formed in Kyiv under Nazi occupation. It loosely inspired the awful Escape to Victory (Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Pele…) but if done right, I think it could be a really interesting look at the idea of collaboration and passive resistance (as FC Start were maybe viewed in both lenses). The other good thing about the book is it helped me learn about how the Ukraine felt about Stalin which I’d not really heard anything about, so it also made me understand the Death Of Stalin movie a bit when I saw it later on
*-It was published befiore Ukraine started to assert their spellings of their cities, so I don’t know if the book will have changed with the times in later printings
Is that a… Double Darcy?
That’s the ONLY reason I know about this movie.
Goodness me, so it is! You know I saw this film and that never once occurred to me.That said, I’m only passingly familiar with the Joe Wright version, I saw it once and it made very little impression. However the BBC series is very much my jam.
And a Hello to Jason Isaacs, too!https://www.kermodeandmayo.com/
Isaacs has such a fun career, he seems to be one of those actors like John Hurt that has no qualms about taking on odd films because they’ll be a bit different. He was fantastic in Death Of Stalin
Yep, and while I haven’t seen it yet I really want to see Skyfire, where Jason Isaacs played somebody he thought was Elon Musk but wasn’t, and he and a bunch of Chinese actors run around saving people.
Mark Kermode said it’s utter trash and he loved it. How much of that is due to Kermode’s friendship with Isaacs is anybody’s guess, but given he recently gave Moonfall a surprisingly positive review for a movie he admits is “galactically stupid” I suspect it’s as much his fondness for garbage cinema rearing its head.
I don’t think you can be a friend of a film critic and an actor and be too precious about any negative reviews. I can’t remember where I read it (I want to say The Metro, a free paper for UK commuters if you’re not from the UK), but I’m pretty sure he has this more grounded view of acting than some of the heavily method ones. Just found a Guardian interview where he says “Acting is a simple job, just hard to do. People tell funny stories about pretentious actors, but all that matters is the audience watches and they are not reminded that you are a strange, poncy person with make-up on.” which is about the tone of the interview I remember, but not the words. My feeling is he’d either accept it or ignore it and then get on with the conversation with the friend.
As for Kermode, I don’t really follow him as much as I should. I know I agree with Kermode on Tarantino though, and I think I’ve vaguely enjoyed him talking about other things. I’ve gone off film in all honesty – it all seems to be either serious subject matter (and those can often feel heavy handed and preachy which oddly bothers me more when they are preaching something I agree with!), or just a serious attempt at making piles of cash. There doesn’t seem to be enough off the wall/experimental things any more so I vaguely keep an eye out for indie films, in and around while I’m watching TV series. It’s only because I’m a fan of this book (and Double Cross) that this film is on my radar.
EDIT; Again, not the article I read, but one from the Belfast Telegraph about being embarrassed to be an actor is a really good reveal of his mindset.
Well, Kermode and Mayo are no longer with the BBC — they’re now a commercial program called “Kermode and Mayo’s Take” (https://www.kermodeandmayo.com/ ), I think via Sony Podcasts. They’re jokingly claiming they now cost too much for the Beeb so they had to sell out.
Arguably a triple as Firth counts as a Double Darcy on his own.
That’s fair. Since he’s a Darcy Double Dipper.
There’s a podcast called World’s Greatest Con that covered this in season one (season 2 is about gameshows). It’s entertaining and emotional and hilarious. Cannot recommend highly enough.
This looks like the best dad movie since Ford vs. Ferrari.
This looks like the best dad movie since Ford vs. Ferrari.Which is why I’m surprised it’s not on AppleTV+, the home for Dad TV! And a Best Picture Oscar, which must really burn Netflix’s bacon….
Very good film. I came out thinking “very good film, but they’ve had to take some liberties with the facts to make it”. But my wife has read the book, and she started telling me that a lot of the seemingly more outlandish plot driving elements were true.The Bond stuff was a bit on the nose though.
Um — not that on-the-nose, PF77. Ian Fleming was desperate to prove himself as the younger, and sicklier, son with a brother who was a star athlete, war hero, and bestselling author of travel books and picaresques like The Flying Visit, where Hitler parachutes into England but nobody believes he’s Hitler! After some goofy misadventures he’s shipped back to Germany….
If you want really wacky, the book Double Cross* features Agent Garbo, everything about his story is just nuts, starting with the fact that he tried to volunteer to join the British spies and they turned him down! You can kind of understand why – in a role that involves discretion, walking in to the embassy and straight up volunteering to be a spy is not exactly endearing.
*- The double cross is a pun too. The Twenty Committee used Roman numerals for their door, which of course is XX, a double cross for a group that dealt with double agents. It could be one of the most over the top efforts in the history of puns
Weren’t David Niven and Christopher Lee a part of this plan, too? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they got roped in because Lee was Fleming’s cousin and in RAF Intelligence ::cough! cough!::, and Niven was a British Commando…whenever he could be somewhere else when a movie studio was looking to “borrow” a movie star for a role!
Niven wasn’t really considered a star by Hollywood terms but he certainly was by the British film industry, who were delighted to have him more or less ordered to be in their movies. Niven, who had gone to Sandhurst, felt he would be better serving his country behind enemy lines than in front of English cameras — a common dilemma for movie stars who’d signed up for military service to fight for their country.
Is Colin Firth turning into Kyle MacLachlan, or is it the other way around?
I read Ben MacIntyre’s fantastic book when it came out 11 years ago. Ben really is superlative at telling these world war spy tales.I was wondering when a film would finally be made.