Operation Mincemeat review — Matthew Macfadyen steals the show in a pacey war thriller

The Times I April 12 2022

Ian Fleming, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, gets the best line in this true-life wartime thriller. While contemplating the nature of spycraft in 1943, Fleming (Johnny Flynn), who was then the personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence, describes the world of espionage as “a wilderness of mirrors in which the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies”.

It could be a tagline for the movie, which stars the national treasure Colin Firth, is directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and seems to be a pleasing home-grown drama about plucky British derring-do. Yet the film is most alive when exploring that central lies-for-truth paradox and describing a small cadre of eccentrics who orchestrate fantasy for the sake of reality and occasionally gettrapped in the mix.

“We’re creating a fake live man from a real dead man” is another nicely weighted line from the screenplay by Michelle Ashford, adapting Ben Macintyre’s non-fiction bestseller. It describes just part of the daunting task facing Firth’s lawyer turned intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, who is charged with convincing the German high command that the body of a Welsh suicide victim called Glyndwr Michael is really a Royal Marine called William Martin, washed up in Spain after a plane crash and carrying crucial information about the Allied invasion of Sicily that, if believed, will profoundly misdirect the Nazis and irrevocably change the course of the war.

The scam was previously filmed as the patchy Ronald Neame effort The Man Who Never Was. That version was derailed by Stephen Boyd’s preposterous turn as a fictional undercover IRA agent-cum-Nazi sympathiser sent by the Germans to spy on the spies. This iteration, with Macintyre’s densely researched tome for background, has an embarrassment of historical riches from which to build a narrative framework.

Culled from the book are twisty details about Montagu’s brother Ivor (Mark Gatiss) and his communist sympathies, plus accounts of how Michael’s body was preserved and transported, as well as a recurring gag about the number of novelists, or wannabe novelists (Fleming included), clogging up the hallways of naval intelligence.

“My God, who isn’t writing a novel?” groans Montagu’s partner in crime, Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), after discovering another scribbler in their ranks. Similarly, when planning Michael’s backstory, the core Operation Mincemeat team, which includes Penelope Wilton as the veteran assistant Hester Leggett and Kelly Macdonald as her protégée Jean Leslie, gather and discuss the growing biography in the manner of a novel-writing masterclass. “There needs to be a love story,” Leggett suggests, implying that no credible drama is complete without one.

And indeed Operation Mincemeat’s greatest liberty with the truth comes from the depiction of a quasi romance, Brief Encounter-style, between the widowed Leslie and the happily married Montagu, one that the film-making team has spun from a featherweight suggestion in Macintyre’s book that Montagu “may” have been telling the truth about being romantically uninvolved with his co-worker.

The romance is nonetheless thematically relevant in a movie where the practice of professional deceit eventually impacts the personal and emotional lives of its protagonists. Firth’s Montagu, for instance, while immersed in deception, ultimately lies to himself about his feelings for Leslie and his wife. And if the passion between Firth and Macdonald doesn’t quite set the world on fire (at 61, Firth feels slightly too old for her, at 46), it’s mostly because, at almost every point in their nascent relationship, the movie has better things with which to be engaged.

They include a muscular sense of pacing built upon the pressure from three simultaneous countdowns — the imminent invasion of Sicily, the urgency of the war effort, and the three-month time span allotted before Michael’s body becomes too decomposed to fuel the ruse. There’s also a plethora of smart supporting roles, most notably Simon Russell Beale as a thankfully low-key Churchill, Flynn doing Fleming as a Bond-style smoothie, and Nicholas Rowe playing a Madrid-based double agent who turns out to be a mildly snooty yet ultimately pansexual dispenser of instant orgasms (don’t ask — and no, he wasn’t in the book).

Best of all, after the TV show Succession, there’s another chance to enjoy the impeccable comedic timing of Macfadyen. He gets most of the best lines and quips and carries his role with a deft balance of sympathy and malign intent. He performs, early on, a fabulous bit of throwaway physical comedy where, cringingly late to a group toast, he shakes his glass quietly to himself, alone. His is the film’s star turn.