Their Finest
Editor’s note: Their Finest opened on April 28. This review was inadvertently left out of last week’s section.
There’s a lot to admire about some British movies made during World War II, while Germany was bombing major cities like London. It was a wonder the films were made at all when a stray V2 rocket could have wiped out the filmmakers.
Danish director Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest celebrates the courage of the artists who refused to quit despite death coming from above and the earnestly corny content of some of the offerings. But there’s a lot to like about the new film even if you’re unfamiliar with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.
Gemma Arterton stars as Catrin Cole, a secretary who simply wants a clerical job at the Ministry of Information. It turns out officials have more ambitious plans for her. When her potential boss discovers a cartoon she wrote for a newspaper, they put her to work writing dialogue for ridiculously stilted propaganda films.
Women in the audience may be especially annoyed because the females onscreen utter what sounds like things men who’ve attended all boys schools imagine women might say. The writer heading the project, Tom Buckley ( Sam Claflin) offers Catrin a salary that’s a fraction of what the men on set make and tells her to write for actresses as if the task were on the same level as making coffee or taking memos.
Catrin quickly proves to be far more valuable. It turns out that she’s good at understanding how people talk. She has also met a pair of twins who tried but didn’t quite succeed to help evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk. The germ of an actual incident is enough to get Catrin and Tom started. They even convince the struggling but self- important actor Ambrose Hilliard ( Bill Nighy) to play the twins’ drunken uncle.
Catrin has qualms about altering the actual story, but creating material even the snobbish Hilliard loves is a formidable boost for her during such a gloomy time. She’s also bringing home rent money while her artist husband Ellis ( Jack Huston) produces acres of canvases that nobody seems to want.
Catrin has additional challenges. The ministry wants her to cast a real life American war hero ( Jake Lacy) who looks great on camera but has no acting aptitude. It also doesn’t help that the ministry keeps changing demands during the middle of shooting.
While the situation in The Finest is fictional, die- hard cinephiles can find a lot of real- world parallels hidden throughout. The producer, Gabriel Baker ( Henry Goodman), is clearly modeled on Alexander Korda, who as a refugee from Hitler helped make British films worthy of the island’s long tradition of stage drama.
Cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov deftly manages to imitate the look of English cameramen like Jack Cardiff ( The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death) who ingeniously made do with facilities that paled next to the equipment and shooting spaces in Hollywood.
If you don’t care about getting a cinema history lesson, screenwriter Gaby Chiappe ( working from Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half) writes plenty of snappy banter that Catrin would be proud to call her own.
It’s also the mark of a good movie when the minor roles are memorable. Jeremy Irons is great as a pompous functionary who seems oddly intent on making physical contact with Catrin, even during formal meetings. ( Perhaps he has a future at Fox News.)
Nonetheless, Their Finest is one of the few movies about making movies that is fun to watch in its own right. If you have trouble telling one end of a camera from another, you’re still likely to enjoy it.