The story being told in Operation Mincemeat is so incredible that it can only be true. Indeed, it is, and though screenwriter Michelle Ashford is adapting the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, the events herein are a surprisingly accurate account of events that took place in the Second World War. The stage to be set here is the decision, presented to then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, between an invasion of the Balkans, where Adolf Hitler fears Allied soldiers will take control of his industrial epicenter, and an invasion of the island of Sicily, which could be a stronghold and a shipping base for Allied troops. Knowing that Hitler was more worried about the Balkans, it was decided that an elaborate scheme would be drawn up to trick the Führer and his forces.
This is all basically background for the story told in the film, which covers the conception, planning, execution and aftermath of “Operation Mincemeat,” an intentional disinformation campaign that involved a corpse, a constructed romance between a fallen soldier and his wartime bride, and a hell of a lot of prayers sent up to whatever deity could oversee pulling off a stunt like this. It’s precisely the kind of plot that could be dreamed up by screenwriters for a quick-witted, fleet-footed espionage action-comedy, and shock of all shocks, that is essentially what Ashford and director John Madden have made here. A stellar line-up of actors have been paired with a treatment of this material that cautiously toes the line between the obvious drama of the situation at hand (steering one geographical avenue away from a despot) and the absurdity of realizing it.
In true ensemble fashion, there really is no “protagonist,” though the story is co-led by the two men at the top of the deceit’s pecking order: Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), the British intelligence officer whose surname is not pronounced the way one might think, presents a plan involving the use of a corpse to an intelligence team of double agents. They reject the plan, though pieces of it are resurrected after John Masterman (Alex Jennings), the chairman, has had some time to think. Combined ideas from Charles and Naval representative Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) are put into action: The body of an unknown homeless man, recently deceased after ingesting rat poison, will be dressed up and dumped just off the Spanish coast. If the trick works, Hitler’s forces will believe that an aircraft recently detected over the Balkans was shot down.
What follows the establishment of this plan is attuned both to the stakes of the mission and to the people involved in pulling it off. A crucial part of the plan is to construct that false romance, and Charles and Ewen hire the keen and intelligent Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), who will write letters back-and-forth between “Major Martin” and his betrothed that contain key information about the manufactured movements of a fake Naval regiment. Another part is obtaining a corpse, which turns out to be a much bigger bother than anyone might have anticipated – especially when the dead man in question is not as alone in this world as those in charge of the operation thought.
There are other parts of this, too, such as how the Spanish authorities will handle things on the other end of a duplicitous act of which very few are aware, as well as the believability with which a decaying body can withstand several months of stasis in order to figure everything out. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Firth and Macfadyen leading the way in a pair of stalwart performances as Montagu and Cholmondeley, as well as appearances from Jason Isaacs, as a Royal Navy officer who reminds quite a bit of a character from a popular literary and screen series about a most debonair agent of espionage, and Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming, years before he wrote those very stories.
Everything about Operation Mincemeat comes together like clockwork, which is fitting for a story that includes a figure like Fleming. Madden’s deft directorial signature is all over the film, too, captured exquisitely by cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov and edited with playful precision by Victoria Boydell (and one would be remiss not to mention composer Thomas Newman, whose score reminds of some of his own work on that movie series). By focusing as much on its characters as its premise and this distinctly strange piece of history, the filmmakers have crafted some top-flight entertainment.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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