Spies, Lies and ‘Operation Mincemeat’

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The valor and determination, industry and armaments that defeated the Nazis was aided, turns out, by stealth. The full extent of Britain’s war of deception was only belatedly revealed decades later as wartime documents were declassified and archives opened. Aside from eavesdropping on the Germans with their codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the British employed strategic ruses to mislead the enemy of their intentions. One of the most successful operations of that ilk is dramatized in Operation Mincemeat, streaming on Netflix.

Operation Mincemeat, based on the scholarship of historian Ben Macintyre, tells the story of a British corpse planted on the Spanish shore, a dead courier of false documents indicating that the Allies planned to invade Nazi-occupied Greece in July 1943. However, in reality, the British-U.S.-Canadian invasion of Continental Europe would begin in Sicily. Britain’s secret services intended for those documents into fall into the hands of German spies in Spain. The fake war plans convinced Hitler to shift his forces from Sicily to Greece, where his army prepared for the invasion that never came. As a result, Sicily was lightly defended and more easily overrun.

Most of the characters are real. Poker-faced Colin Firth stars as Ewen Montagu, a special operations agent posing as a naval supply officer. Johnny Flynn depicts Ian Fleming as glib fellow—yes, the mastermind behind James Bond spent the war in Room 13 of naval intelligence under the command of M, honing his love of deadly gadgets and the glamor of spycraft. Matthew Macfayden plays Montagu’s sidekick, Charles Cholmondeley and Kelly Macdonald the operation’s executive assistant, Jean Leslie. Simon Russell Beale puts on a sterling performance as bulldog-voiced Winston Churchill, who backs Montagu’s bizarre, corpse-driven scheme because he preferred the fantastic to the mundane.

Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is no stranger to cinematic confections and sweetens Operation Mincemeat with those saccharine piano notes that signify sensitivity in Hollywood movies, lightening the story with a few comical moments of cloak and dagger. The brisk pace of early scenes begins to drag, wartime London looks surprisingly unscathed by the blitz—and yet, despite its flaws, Operation Mincemeat convincingly conveys the mechanics of an elaborate operation of deception that begins with procuring the corpse of a London vagrant, dressing him as a Royal Marines officer and composing a full backstory complete with a love letter and photo from his sweetheart at home stuffed into his pockets.

Michelle Ashord’s screenplay is fascinating for its multiple, overlap of masquerades. The covert war behind the armed conflict vies for emotional connection from the story’s characters with Montagu’s unravelling marriage, concealed behind his wife’s decision to take the children to America for safety during the war; the shadow play of romantic implication between Montagu and Jean as they role-play the dead Marines officer and his fictitious fiancé; Cholmondeley’s hidden envy and his agreement to spy on his boss from the suspicion by higher ups that Montagu’s brother is spying for the Soviets. Are the Germans also playing a game with the British by pretending to believe the Greek invasion plans delivered by the corpse, only to lay a trap for the Allies in Sicily? In a dark world of mirrors, reality can be hard to discern.