I'll avoid giving anything away but just say there's an important contemporary story immersed in this period story but this gets buried under an overly involved and ultimately uninteresting tale. Clearly lots of names thought it wise to sign up for performing in this mess but it's lost on me why anyone thought the screwball tone and noirish plotting was necessary. Its easy to see that with some good script editing, the film could have come in 30mins shorter and still achieve what it does. Digging down to the core historical circumstances revealed in the story, there's plenty of material to make a riveting and quite different film.