Chill, Winston
In war drama Churchill, Brian Cox plays a prime minister with rage to spare
We’re used to seeing Winston Churchill being all, well, Churchillian: chewing on a maduro or popping out of a siren suit, delivering rousing speeches to stir up Tommy to see off the Hun and be home for breakfast. Which makes Churchill, the new drama from director Jonathan Teplitzky
(The Railway Man, Indian Summers), something of a surprise. Set in the 24 hours leading up to the D-day landings of 6 June 1944, Brian Cox — who can barely suppress his joy at landing such a plum plummy role — plays the prime minister at his most frustrated and ineffectual which, as a character study, proves quite fascinating.
Though hindsight can, of course, determine that the Normandy landings were the right course of action, at the time the proposal to send more than 150,000 Allied troops to the beaches of northern France to be picked off in the breakers was contentious to say the least. Among the supporters of the plan were US General Dwight D Eisenhower, played by a chirpy John Slattery, and British General Bernard Montgomery (Julian Wadham), who favoured a short, sharp attack. Churchill, foreseeing the likely high casualties — and remembering the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, during which, as First Lord of the Admirality, his insistence on aggression doomed 46,000 Allied troops — favours delay. But what is also devastating to the prime minister, and provides the emotional crux of Teplitzky’s film, is to discover that his opinion is surplus to requirements.
Churchill is about personal conviction versus political office, about duty to one’s country and also one’s conscience, and what to do when the two are no longer aligned. But it is also a film more generally about ageing: about seeing one’s powers wane, about accepting the ineffectuality of humanity, even the greatest examples of it, and about realising that the world will keep turning without you: a point made to stirring effect through David Higgs’s majestic cinematography, often showing a character dwarfed by a giant colonnade, or a vast expanse of sea.
Two other films coming this year also cover similar ground: Christopher Nolan’s
Dunkirk, is attracting customary fervour (and not just because Harry Styles is in it); and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, for which Gary Oldman is already receiving Oscar buzz (apparently on the basis of a single still image). But this quiet, meditative (and, as there are no battle scenes, considerably less expensive) drama, like its protagonist, should not be readily discounted.
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Churchill is out in cinemas on 2 June