Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn, Jason Isaacs
Intro:
… excels as a thrilling and dryly humourous spy drama …
On the 30th of April 1943, the body of British Maj. William Martin washed up on the Spanish coast. Among his personal effects, there were confidential documents pertaining to an upcoming invasion of Greece by the Allied forces. This discovery, initially by a local fisherman and then by Spanish officials, would become a crucial moment for the Allied fight against the Nazi regime. In turn, Maj. William Martin became one of the most important figures in the history of World War II. A hell of an accomplishment, for a man who technically didn’t even exist.
The latest from British director John Madden, continuing his success with political intrigue after the Jessica Chastain vehicle Miss Sloane a few years back, Operation Mincemeat spends as much time looking at fiction as a component of espionage, as it does fiction as part of everyday life.
Littered with references to contemporaneous authors, and even featuring one in the plot proper in the form of Bond creator Ian Fleming (portrayed with a charming spin by Johnny Flynn), its depiction of the ‘war of shadows’ shows the separation of fact and fiction – much like the eventual line between victory and defeat – to be thinner than a lost eyelash.
As Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth getting another chance to show his spy stripes after Kingsman), Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), and Hester Legget (Penelope Wilton) fill in the details of this fictitious man’s life, everything from childhood hobbies to unrequited love gets pulled out of their own lives. This leads to fascinating inquiries into the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, even outside of highly anxious circumstances. It even creeps into commenting on its own status as a dramatic production, with the selection of the prospective Major’s body playing out like a perverse casting call.
To that end, the way writer Michelle Ashford of Masters of Sex fame sets up the drama brings out brainier concepts amidst highly tense spy thrills. How things, and even people, that aren’t even real can have a real impact on the world and the people living in it; how falsehoods require just as much, if not far more, intricacies than the facts; and how fiction acts as a veneer which allows hardened reality to reveal itself, in a way that simple truth would be less equipped to do. It’s why dramatisations like this exist in the first place, after all.
Operation Mincemeat excels as a thrilling and dryly humourous spy drama, but where it truly shines is in its delectable metatextual musings that are as much an examination of storytelling as a communication tool as it is of an event that redefines the phrase “stranger than fiction”.
Humorous