John Madden’s telling of the 1943 deception is well cast, nicely tailored and too gentle for its own good. Matthew Macfadyen and a single scene of Penelope Wilton writing a letter are worth the evening; the love triangle built around them is not.
John Madden’s film tells one of the better stories of the war: in 1943 British intelligence dressed a corpse as an officer, filled his pockets with invented letters, and dropped him in the sea off Spain so the Germans would find him and believe the Allies were bound for Greece rather than Sicily. It was filmed before, as The Man Who Never Was in 1956. Madden’s version is longer, kinder and busier, and it is a decent evening that keeps getting in its own way. It runs 128 minutes and could lose twenty without harm.
The pleasure is in the paperwork. Michelle Ashford’s script is at its best when the plan is a list of problems: where to find a body, how to keep it fresh, what a Marines officer carries in his wallet, what he writes to his girl. Matthew Macfadyen plays Charles Cholmondeley as a man who has never been the most interesting person in any room and has stopped minding, and he is the film’s heart. Colin Firth’s Ewen Montagu is the one who talks; Cholmondeley is the one who thought of it. Paul Ritter, as the coroner Bentley Purchase, treats the whole business as an administrative nuisance and gets the biggest laughs for it.
The scene we did not expect is a short one. Penelope Wilton’s Hester Leggett, the senior secretary who runs the office, is asked to write the letter the dead man will carry from his fiancée, and she reads it aloud as she goes. It is the letter of a woman who had a man to write to once and has not since. We were moved more than we thought a spy film could manage, and it was Wilton’s voice doing it, flat and careful and declining to break. For two minutes the invented man is the most alive person on screen. The film never quite gets back there.
Around that, Ashford and Madden have built a love triangle. Montagu is married, his wife and children gone to America; Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), the clerk who lends the dead man’s girl her photograph, is a widow; Cholmondeley is in love with her and watches Montagu get there first. Macdonald does a great deal with it, but the triangle is written in the key of Hester’s letter and played in the key of a Sunday evening serial, and every cut from the plan to the pining lets a little pressure out. Johnny Flynn’s Ian Fleming narrates from a typewriter, and the film cannot resist reminding us what he will go on to type. Once is a joke. By the fourth time it is a nudge in the ribs.
Sebastian Blenkov shoots the Admiralty basement in brown and amber, desk lamps doing most of the work and smoke in every room, and gives the mortuary a colder grey. It is handsome and it is also the look every British wartime film has worn for thirty years. John Paul Kelly’s rooms are properly cramped, files on every surface and one map taking up a wall. Andrea Flesch puts Firth in a three-piece suit that fits and Macfadyen in one that does not, which is characterisation done cheaply and well. Thomas Newman’s score is strings and soft piano, and it reassures us at moments when the film should be frightening us. Victoria Boydell cuts briskly between London and the sea in the middle stretch, and that is where the film is tightest.
Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill is a growl and a cigar and little more, and Jason Isaacs’s Godfrey is written as the man who says no so that somebody else can be right. A subplot about Montagu’s own household and where its loyalties lie, with Mark Gatiss, could go entirely. By the final third we were aware of the runtime, and aware that the film cared more about who would end up with whom than about whether the trick would work, which is the wrong way round.
Madden made Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Mrs Brown (1997), and he still handles a roomful of good actors with ease; nobody here is bad and several are better than what they are given. What he has not made is a thriller. The Man Who Never Was kept to the procedure and did not stop to fall in love. This one stops often. Watch it for Macfadyen, for Wilton’s two minutes and for Ritter. It carries a 12A, and a parent and a teenager could sit through it together without either one suffering.
