The wartime submarine drama U-571 has been accused, as was The Patriot, of distorting history. But its sins are nowhere near as pervasive or comprehensive as those of the Mel Gibson propaganda piece.
Let’s get the facts out the way. The Enigma machine was a German encryption device which looked like a glorified typewriter. Getting hold of one was vital to the Allies’ being able to decode German messages and thereby halt some of the submarine attacks on supply lines between the United States and Britain. In 1941, a British crew first captured an Enigma machine; it was not until 1944 that the Americans got their hands on one.
U-571 is set in 1942, just after the US entered the war. It has an American submarine crew sent out on a secret mission to seize an Enigma machine. Naturally, or there would be no movie, things do not flow smoothly, and much derring-do – not to mention hoarse shouting and grimy sweating – is needed to save the situation.
But this Enigma variation is not too gross an abuse of history. Along with a sententious dedication to “Allied sailors and officers who risked their lives”, the facts are mentioned at the movie’s end, when they should have been set out at the start – and it’s all too easy to assume that the British achievements are a later appendage to all this American heroism. Thus is myth born, and if the world were to take its history lessons from American movies we’d have a pretty weird narrative of the past, but it’s not exactly Holocaust denial.
It’s only a movie. And, as a movie, U-571 is a pretty compelling one. War films are not to everyone’s taste, nor to mine, in most moods, but U-571 is detailed and suspenseful enough to hold the attention for a couple of hours, and even to have one rooting for these desperate seamen. A mobile camera animates the claustrophobic spaces of the leaky old subs (this could send chills down a Russian spine), and there are several truly scary moments. I pray I will never be in a submarine that is being depth-charged or have to deal with a faulty air-lock in the bilge.
Matthew McConaughey, as the main hero, has a proud Roman nose with a very short Roman haircut to match, and convinces entirely in the role. The subordinate characters are well cast, even if one occasionally confuses “Rabbit” with “Trigger”. Do all small-band-of-men movies use daffy nicknames? Harvey Keitel, as McConaughey’s second-in-command, is engaging, though perhaps a touch parodic in places; and he wouldn’t have reminisced about his experiences “back in World War I” – he would have said “in the last war”. But never mind. U-571 may lack depth, but it carries an exciting charge.