Operation Mincemeat (2021)

A British WWII military conspiracy is fraught with infighting

Matthew Macfadyen, Colin Firth and Johnny Flynn in Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat (2021)

In theaters and streaming on Netflix

Britain, early 1943.  Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth), a lawyer who’s embedded as an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy, studies a map of wartime Europe.  He and others schooled in military tactics can clearly envision British forces, partnered with Americans and Canadians, storming the beaches of Sicily, strategically positioning Allied troops to strike at the Nazi war machine.  

But, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) warns Montagu and his other wartime advisors, Hitler can surely guess “what anyone with a bloody atlas can see we’re going to do.”

So, how to outfox the Fuhrer?  Montagu and his team promise Churchill they’ll devise a hoax to convince the Nazis that Allied forces will be landing not in Sicily but in Greece.  That will fool the Germans into moving their forces there, anticipating an attack that will never come.  In order to pull off the deception, covert British operatives will hand over faked letters detailing the falsehood to high-ranking German officers.  Hoodwinked by what they read, Hitler’s minions will persuade the Fuhrer to move his tanks and battalions away from Sicily and toward Greece.

This sly bait and switch, code named Operation Mincemeat, was an actual WWII British exploit meticulously crafted to deceive Hitler.  It was also deeply, crazily risky.  The movie, crisply directed by John Madden, is a gripping depiction of this dangerous, even farcical, deception that repeatedly veered toward collapse.

The bizarre plan’s opening gambit was to float the corpse of “William Martin”, a falsely named officer in the Royal Marines, onto the shore of Spain, a neutral country crawling with German and Allied spies.  In one pocket of the dead man’s uniform was a concocted letter from, and a fake photograph of, a woman meant to be his fiancée.

Most important, the corpse carried a briefcase containing invented correspondence between two generals outlining the bogus plan to invade Greece.  British undercover agents in Spain were to deliver the “correspondence” to the Germans, and Montagu’s team worked closely to make the letters’ wording believable to Hitler’s generals.

Michelle Ashford’s serpentine script (from Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book) makes this intrepid sleight of hand compelling watching.  She doesn’t shy away from exposing the points in the scheme where British optimism proved frightfully unfounded.   The maze-like plotting pulls us in so persuasively that we look on uneasily as the operation teeters on the brink of disaster.

The screenplay weaves multiple deceptions.  Working alongside Montagu – while clandestinely spying on him under orders from their commanding officer – is grounded RAF pilot and officer Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen, of HBO's Succession).   The two men’s temperaments clash, bitingly.  In scheming to stick it to Hitler, Montagu can throw caution to the winds.  But Cholmondeley, realizing how precarious the effort is, remains by-the-book wary.

Kelly Macdonald as Jean Leslie, a mission transcriptionist in Operation Mincemeat

Ratcheting up the tension, both men have fallen in love with one of the transcriptionists in the effort, Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald).  She’s a widow, reluctant to begin a new relationship and not intending to deceive either man.  Montagu, who’s Jewish, has sent his estranged wife and their two children to America for safety.  He confusingly, even dishonestly, mixes his affection for Jean with their shared loyalty to the mission.  Cholmondeley, not as dashing as Montagu, sees in Jean a chance at love that he’s denied himself in his devotion to his career and to his widowed mother. 

But these two irritable men, circling one another, must cooperate in order to pull off a cunning act of disinformation.   Unfortunately for both, it seems that what can go wrong, does go wrong.  A Spanish coroner at first wonders if the dead man actually drowned (but finally makes common cause with the plot).  Spanish authorities simply want to return the briefcase with the false documents to the British, meaning the Allies can’t be sure the envelopes inside have been opened and read by Germans in Madrid, and their contents passed on to Berlin.   And the alleged anti-Nazi faction close to Hitler that supposedly wants to bring him down might be more fiction than reality.

What’s more, the storytelling has a wily trick of its own to play.  One of the British conspirators, who’d in fact devised an earlier template for the plan, is a wryly observant officer named Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn).  As his co-conspirators scurry to bring off the ruse, Fleming maddeningly pounds away on his typewriter, announcing to the room that he’s working on a “spy story.”  Also, from the movie’s opening, in voiceover, James Bond’s future creator pours out heartfelt esteem for the Allies’ audacity and courage against the German onslaught.

Madden keeps the action spinning, and the actors stay firmly in character.  Firth is both gallant and foolishly brazen as Montagu.   As Cholmondeley, Macfadyen, coiled, skeptical and bound by military tradition, relentlessly argues for patience.  Their disputes suggest that victory will require two sorts of British nerve, one going for broke, the other unwaveringly carrying on.

Skilled as both actors are, for me the movie’s most momentous performance is Beale’s as Churchill.  He’s in only two scenes, but he makes the war-weary Prime Minister’s anguish fill the screen.  You don’t doubt for a moment that the fate of millions, civilian and military, lies beneath all of Churchill’s contriving.  Beale feels colossal and urgent when he’s in motion, out of doors, but preyed upon and burdened indoors, in his office, when Churchill must order the improbable operation to continue. He makes the weight of wartime responsibility feel both crushing and, somehow, startlingly, endurable.

The operation’s hair trigger details give the movie its speed and charge.  It’s not just the scheming we relish.  The stiff-upper-lip willpower bemuses and satisfies.  It isn’t true that dead men, especially dead soldiers, tell no tales.  As happens here, their sacrifices, ardently portrayed, can remind us of two unalterable facts.  War (1) costs lives and (2) summons valor.  Those twin truths can never be faked.