Churchill
Even now, more than 50 years after his death, Winston Churchill is often voted the greatest Briton ever. But anyone who goes to see this film expecting a sepia-tinted eulogy to flag-waving, cigars and those extraordinary speeches is in for quite a big shock. For in the new film from Jonathan Teplitzky, who brought us the Japanese prisoner-of-war drama The Railway Man, Churchill is depicted in a way we are certainly not accustomed to. Yes, we know about the heavy drinking and the ‘black dog’ depressions. But here, in the days immediately before D-Day, he is depicted as a drunken bully, haunted by his past and out of touch with modern warfare.
More than anything, he is portrayed as a dangerous irritant, whose intransigence and interference could ruin everything. Which, presumably, is why we see the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, politely but firmly ignoring him, while Field Marshal Montgomery treats him with a scorn and disdain that borders on the cruel.
If D-Day was the moment that finally started to deliver the Allies their ‘finest hour’ – the famous phrase that Churchill coined in a speech four years earlier – then, according to Teplitzky and his screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, it was going to be in spite of Churchill rather than because of him. This is provocative old stuff.
And you’d expect quite a resultant fuss – headlines screaming ‘Churchill’s reputation trashed’ – or rather you would if the film had a bigger budget and starred some Hollywood A-lister rather than the stalwart Scot Brian Cox. But you might also expect more of a fuss if the film’s starting point wasn’t quite so interesting. I’ll leave it to real historians to separate fact from fiction, but for all its provocations – and von Tunzelmann admits she has manipulated some events – this is certainly a film that gets you thinking.
The key scene comes right at the beginning as we see Churchill standing on a lonely beach, staring forlornly as the waves turn blood-red before his eyes. It’s a disorientating start – is this a dream or is this Churchill as an old man remembering the 4,400 men who died on that windy June day in 1944?
In fact it’s neither, for, as Churchill turns to his wife Clementine (a rather good Miranda Richardson), muttering about ‘beaches always bring it back’ and ‘30 years ago’, we realise that Churchill is remembering Gallipoli, the disastrous attempt to open a second front during the First World War with an amphibious landing on
‘It’s provocative... you might expect more of a fuss if the start wasn’t so interesting’
what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Heavily backed by Churchill – then-First Lord of the Admiralty – the campaign was a total failure, costing the lives of more than 56,000 Allied troops, including some 4,000 Irish, more than 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders. ‘So many young men,’ we see Churchill recalling, as he vows not to let it happen again, ‘so much waste.’ It’s relevant to point out that Teplitzky is Australian and von Tunzelmann a New Zealander. So does Churchill echo to the sound of scores being settled? Frankly, it does a little, which will divide audiences. Cox gives it plenty in the central role, sensibly opting – given the lack of physical resemblance – to give a proper performance rather than an impersonation. Around him, a supporting cast of fine character actors gets better as the film goes along. John Slattery (Mad Men) plays the steely Eisenhower, and Julian Wadham is terrifying as Montgomery. Richard Durden is splendid as Churchill’s trusted friend and War Cabinet colleague Jan Smuts, who wisely tells Churchill: ‘Sometimes you have to accept that you can’t lead everything from the front.’ This, however, is a film that never quite convinces. I found it hard to believe that Churchill would dictate complex memos directly to a typist rather than a shorthand secretary, but not as hard as I found it to believe that King George VI (James Purefoy) would turn up in person to dissuade Churchill from the act of near lunacy that would have seen both the king and his prime minister sailing to the Normandy beaches themselves. Ultimately, the film generally overcooks its premise, and I think it’s telling and less than generous that, as the end-credit captions attempt to introduce some historical perspective, there is no admission that many of Churchill’s concerns were well founded. Thousands of men would indeed die that day; only this time not in vain.
IT’S A FACT During the Boer War Churchill escaped a PoW camp by scaling a wall and eventually being hidden in a mineshaft by a British mine manager