With any war movie, the safe audience bet typically favors the immediate, graphic horrors of battle. That way, when you see a title such as “Hacksaw Ridge,” you know a director will be operating with a cinematic license to slaughter.
The borrowed corpse? He played the role of a fictional British soldier with a fastidiously detailed back story. The body, in uniform, with letters from his fake sweetheart tucked in a pocket, was strategically plunked into the ocean off the coast of Spain, officially a neutral country at the time.The corpse washed up on the coast of a fishing village, as planned.
Screenwriter Michelle Ashford works from the book “Operation Mincemeat” by Ben Macintyre, while carving out a lot of her own narrative for the work and emotional lives of Montagu, Cholmondeley and Leslie. This chaste but tense romantic triangle works roughly 61% of the time. By the book’s account, Montagu was indeed sweet on Leslie. Director John Madden’s film has a lot to juggle, though, and there are times when you think, yes, well, we’d better get back to the mission.
Macfadyen, lately of “Succession,” takes top stealth honors, deftly capturing the rapid-fire story-conference banter with Firth — they’re a two-man writers’ room, in episodic TV parlance — as well as the forlorn, lovelorn loner not above romantic sabotage. This is not the first film to take on this story: In 1956, director Ronald Neame’s heavily fictionalized “The Man Who Never Was” starred Clifton Webb as Montagu.