C

When Hollywood makes a film about the German encoding device that was one of the Allies’ most troublesome problems during World War II, it comes up with a splashy submarine adventure like “U-571” (2000), which centered on a macho assault on an enemy ship to snatch one of the machines (and made US personnel the heroes). From England, on the other hand, the subject gets the “Masterpiece Theatre” treatment in Michael Apted’s “Enigma,” a highly polished but contrived and strangely staid spy story centered on doings at the top secret den of codebreakers who were housed at Bletchley Park, the sprawling “Station X” whose brilliant residents, accompanied by a small army of clerks and military men, worked feverishly to crack the German cipher and give the Allied armies valuable information to use against the Axis powers.

What’s especially curious about “Enigma” is that, in its own low-key way, it ultimately proves as blissfully oblivious to accuracy as Jonathan Mostow’s “Run Silent, Run Deep” update was–the picture offers an ounce of historical truth and a pound of dramatic license. It’s based on a novel by Robert Harris, who concocted a simply absurd plot in which math whiz Tom Jericho (dull Dougray Scott) returns to service at Bletchley after a nervous breakdown occasioned by his unhappy romance with a secretary there, the impossibly tall, statuesque and well-coiffed Claire Romilly (Suffron Burrows). The perpetually gloomy fellow now finds that his erstwhile inamorata has unaccountably disappeared, and soon he’s searching for her while simultaneously trying to break a new German code before a Nazi assault on a huge North Atlantic convoy. His rather clumsy investigation teams him with Claire’s former roommate, Hester Wallace (a newly-mousy Kate Winslet), a frumpy file clerk with big glasses with whom Tom is obviously destined to fall in love; and together the duo eventually raise the suspicions of snooty security man Wigram (Jeremy Northam, doing the sort of violently condescending routine that James Fox seemed to have a patent on for many years). The twists of the narrative are too numerous to count, and it wouldn’t be fair to reveal them anyway; suffice it to say that the missing Claire was more than she appeared to be, that there’s a good possibility of a mole working inside Bletchley Park, and that the eventual unraveling of the German cipher is related to a now-famous Soviet atrocity in occupied Poland.

All of this might appear to be a solid basis for a wartime thriller, but unfortunately such proves not to be the case. The labyrinthine plot convolutions come across as warmed-over Le Carre, very clumsily stitched together–a particular surprise in that the adaptation was done by Tom Stoppard, one of Britain’s most versatile wordsmiths, who in this instance does nothing in the least unconventional or imaginative with the material. (The massive ineptitude of the security forces and police in dealing with people who literally walk off with classified materials and then hide them in rather obvious places is a particularly weak link in the story.) Not that it’s been realized with much skill. Apted’s direction is careful but enervated; his attention to period detail is commendable, and visually he’s created a succession of lush compositions, but the film moves along sluggishly (despite which parts of the narrative remain obstinately opaque). He also encourages the cast to employ a stiff-upper-lip style of acting that seems positively archaic. Only Northam rises above the general glumness at all, and he makes Wigram into little more than a caricature of the haughty aristocrat among plebeians. Certainly Scott and Winslet don’t do much to enliven Jericho and Wallace; they’re but pale imitations of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll from “The Thirty-Nine Steps.” As for Burrows, she flounces about looking like a model more than an actress. The supporting players are little more than sticks of thespian furniture, giving one-note readings to a parade of one-note characters.

That the Bletchley Park operation can serve as the basis for solid drama has been demonstrated before–in Herbert Wise’s 1996 telefilm “Breaking the Code,” for example, which featured Derek Jacobi as the cryptologist Alan Turing (though that was basically as character study emphasizing the protagonist’s doom-laden lifestyle). In this instance, however, the result lacks lucidity, suspense and simple conviction. In Stoppard’s script, one of Claire Romilly’s regular responses to people disappointed in something or other is to say with more than a hint of sarcasm, “Poor you.” It would be more appropriate for her to look directly at the camera and address those words to the audience–with feeling.