Wives wage all-out assault on the tear ducts
★★★★★ Dir: Peter Cattaneo. Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Sharon Horgan, Greg Wise, Jason Flemyng, India Amarteifio, Emma Lowndes, Gaby French, Amy James-kelly. 12A Cert, 112 minutes
When it comes to tugging at our heartstrings, director Peter Cattaneo has previous form. The Full Monty was one of the biggest British films of the Nineties, and now he is back in reassuringly feelgood territory.
Military Wives is based on the true story of an ensemble of servicemen’s spouses who formed a choir and later enlisted the help of TV choirmaster Gareth Malone. Four more such groups were swiftly founded and a BBC series and hit single followed.
The cultural impact of the Military Wives Choir movement was considerable (there is now a network of 75 choirs in British military bases across the UK and overseas), but Rosanne Flynn and Rachel Tunnard, the scriptwriters, focus on the personal, serving up a cheerful story of sisterhood, adversity overcome and music healing the deepest wounds.
There is a sense it could turn to mush at any moment, and the movie is transparent about waging a frontal assault on the audience’s tear ducts.
However, this is offset by solidly unsentimental performances from leads Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan.
They play head-butting alpha females given the job of maintaining morale among the women back at base when their husbands are shipped off to Helmand province in Afghanistan.
Horgan reminds us of her gift for brittle comedy (seen in such sitcoms as Catastrophe) as Lisa, a cynical and disorganised mum from the wine o’clock school of parenting. Scott Thomas plays her social and spiritual opposite in Kate, wife of the colonel and primmer than a Women’s Institute floral display.
But her poise is an act; underneath the bustle and the hauteur, her heart has been broken by the death of her serviceman son.
With her husband (Greg Wise) volunteering for another tour, her coping mechanism is to splurge on tat from the shopping channel. Lisa, by contrast, anaesthetises her sorrows by hitting the bottle, oblivious to the bad example she is setting her teenage daughter Frankie (India Amarteifio). Both fed up with the routine of their everyday lives, Lisa and Kate come together to raise morale by starting a ladies’ choir.
At first there is tension between Lisa’s strategy of making it up as she goes and Kate’s determination to do things by the book.
However, in a typically cinematic trajectory, the choir turns out to be first rate (emotive covers of Yazoo and The Human League provides an avenue for the singers to channel their anxieties) and are invited to perform in front of the cameras at the Royal Albert Hall.
Cattaneo hasn’t really troubled the box office since The Full Monty (films such as Lucky Break hardly made waves, although he had more success with the sublime TV comedy Rev, starring Tom Hollander as an East End vicar) and Military Wives sometimes feels like an attempt to make a gender-flipped cover version of that earlier smash.
In a classic Brit-com flanking manoeuvre, the film simultaneously reduces the viewer to tears while inviting us to bask in the fuzzy glow of our friends and neighbours’ innate decency.
Luckily, it succeeds, thanks in no small part to the commitment shown by Horgan and Scott Thomas and a script that manages to press all the right buttons.
Afterwards, your first compulsion will be to rush home and hug a loved one. Mission accomplished, Cattaneo.