Review of "Operation Mincemeat," a drama about one of the most incredible episodes of World War II
A spy thriller starring Colin Firth, the story behind it is unfortunately more interesting than the movie itself.
World War II is about to reach a turning point: Allied troops are about to land on Sicily and begin reclaiming Europe from the Nazis. There is one serious problem: absolutely everyone, including Hitler and Mussolini, understands that the attack will take place on the Italian island. The British secret service is faced with a difficult task: they have to figure out how to deceive the Nazi leadership and make them believe that the real purpose of the landing is Greece.
While their superiors decide to use tried-and-true methods, a small unit led by former royal lawyer Ewan Montague (Colin Firth) decides on a gamble. Their plan is to drop off the corpse of a supposedly British naval officer on the shores of neutral Spain, with a fake report of an attack on Greece in his suitcase. Only it is necessary to do everything so that the enemy does not have the slightest suspicion of the authenticity of the papers and the fictitious military man.
Operation Meatloaf is an utterly startling and completely real episode of World War II, perhaps best showing just how much goes on behind the scenes of large-scale field battles. Making a movie about this story seems like a win-win. So much heat, so much drama, so many vivid details: the search for a suitable homeless man's corpse, the creation of a fictional biography from scratch, the fake fiancee letters and the fateful eyelash the British put in the letter to see if the Spaniards had printed it (the eyelash was missing - which is how MI6 realized the envelope had been opened). It's even strange that no one thought to make a big movie on the subject before.
But director John Madden's picture perfectly demonstrates why an interesting story doesn't necessarily equal an interesting movie. All the fascinating details of the operation are much more creatively retold in a ten-minute YouTube video. A two-hour movie simply doesn't have enough material to evenly distribute the events throughout the timeline. The spy part of the story is told very cheerfully, especially the episodes in Spain where the double, triple and quadruple agents try by all means to deceive the Nazis - so that they believe that they, in turn, deceive the British. But there are only about twenty minutes of these scenes in the whole film.
All the rest of the time we watch the personal dramas of the participants in the operations, written in the same lazy way. One's wife has left, another lives in the shadow of a more successful (and dead) brother, a third still can't get over the death of a loved one, even though so many years have passed. There is, of course, the obligatory love triangle. The characters don't shy away from describing their problems aloud and throwing entire pages of exposition at each other. For a movie about covert operations, everything in "Meatloaf" is very superficial: phrases, gestures, actions. Any Stirlitz or James Bond would reveal such spies in no time at all.
Behind all these personal squabbles, however, is a curious movie about the very essence of storytelling. The fictional officer Martins becomes the center of all the traumas, unrealized hopes and reveries of his authors - in writing the biography of the fake sailor, each of the characters projects his own personality onto him. If the script weren't so hardheaded at times, Meatloaf would make an excellent meta-commentary on how reality shapes fiction, and that, in turn, breaks through and begins to influence reality. It is not for nothing that one of the central characters in the film is Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, who worked in British intelligence during World War II and invented the very ruse on which the entire operation was based.
This article was sponsred by Robert Charvet
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