Jonathan Teplitzky (2017)
This is the first of two Winston Churchill biopics scheduled for release in 2017, with Darkest Hour due to arrive in cinemas in November. You wonder why now. A year ending in seven is one of the few portions of a decade that can’t be a World War II anniversary. Churchill’s own dates are 1874-1965. It’s probably mere coincidence – though you can’t help wondering if it might be Oscar-oriented thinking. In the last ten years or so, George VI, Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher have all won Academy Awards for the actors playing them, in pictures that have also done well commercially. The people behind Churchill and Darkest Hour may have reckoned that a central figure more obviously heroic than any of those other three should be a safe bet to deliver the same goods.
Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man) and written by Alex von Tunzelmann, Churchill is far from a good film but it’s an odder, more conflicted one than you’d guess from the hagiographic trailer. The narrative, covering the days leading up to the Normandy landings in June 1944, and D-Day itself, begins and ends with Churchill (Brian Cox) walking on a beach. When he looks at the sea at the start, his imagination turns it to blood. For most of the film, Churchill is presented as egocentric yet agonised. The bloody waters reflect his haunted remorse for the deaths of young men in the Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, a campaign waged when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. Nostalgic for his earlier days of active soldiering, he hankers, even at the age of seventy, after being a military commander as well as a political leader. This combination of personal imperatives leads him obstinately to oppose the Allies’ plans for Operation Overlord – to the mounting exasperation of Eisenhower (John Slattery), Montgomery (Julian Wadham) and Alan Brooke (Danny Webb). A thwarted Churchill, on the eve of D-Day, takes to his bed and falls into a near-catatonic depression. (I assume this is a piece of dramatic licence.)
Field Marshal Jan Smuts (Richard Durden), his old sparring partner from the Boer War and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, comes to the sick room and, with Churchill silent, starts composing on his behalf the speech the Prime Minister is to broadcast to the nation the following evening. Accompanying Smuts is Helen Garrett (Ella Purnell), the secretary to whom, in most of their exchanges up to this point, Churchill has been abominably and aggressively rude. He rallies enough to take issue with one of Smuts’s suggestions and to issue a renewed lament for the terrible loss of life he thinks is bound to take place on the Normandy beaches. But Churchill is brought fully to his senses by the distraught Helen, who explains her fiancé is a midshipman on one of the Royal Navy ships involved in the planned offensive. The moment is transformative for the film as well as its protagonist. When he asks his wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson) what he’ll be when the war is over, she replies, ‘You’ll always be the man who led us through this’. From this point on, Jonathan Teplitzky subscribes to the same view: Churchill suddenly turns into what you expected it to be and stops fighting Lorne Balfe’s music – a persistent reminder, from the outset, that the film is dealing with heroic events and actions. Churchill’s radio broadcast in light of ‘the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month’ acknowledges Eisenhower’s leadership but there are no further scenes involving Ike or Monty or Brooke. The end sequence on the shore, like the opening one, features business with Churchill’s Homburg but the seawater now runs clear – as if D-Day had somehow redeemed Gallipoli. The closing legends describe the Normandy landings as a decisive success,without mention of casualties, and note that Churchill is ‘often acclaimed as the greatest Briton of all time’.
Although its unexpected and erratic aspects mitigate against predictability, Churchill is standard-issue historical biopic in other ways. Even allowing that the title character keeps harping on the same theme, Alex von Tunzelmann’s dialogue is repetitive, as well as stagy – ditto the stiff set-ups in which Jonathan Teplitzky arranges his actors to deliver their often over-explicit lines. The first scene in which Churchill meets Eisenhower, in the grounds of the latter’s British headquarters, with Montgomery and Brooke also in attendance, is ludicrous. ‘If Hitler were to drop a bomb on this little patch, he would destroy the entire high command of our Allied Forces!’ declares Churchill on arrival at the gathering, with a little chuckle at his witty insight. (You anticipate some kind of wry response from elsewhere in the high command but don’t get it: the script, whatever its other reservations about Churchill, regards him throughout as an unsurpassable gag-man.) Eisenhower immediately apologises that Churchill has had to travel so far for the meeting but explains that the venue had to be out of the way: once the characters start to disagree, still in the open air, the actors, particularly Brian Cox, shout loudly enough to be heard in Berlin. In a later scene inside his HQ, Eisenhower asks those present to take a seat after they’ve already done so. There are times when the serious drama of Churchill verges unfortunately on the territory of sitcom (Winnie – maybe plus exclamation mark). This is especially so when the other characters exchange eye-rolling glances, in a can-you-believe-what-the-incorrigible-old-rogue-just-said kind of way.
Teplitzky and his cinematographer David Higgs create some impressive images of lone figures in huge landscapes or other settings – Churchill on the beach or standing at vast windows, Eisenhower among the columns of what is recognisably (to this viewer) Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Showing off the splendid locations sometimes also has unintended comical effects, though. We get that Clementine Churchill, as her husband’s helpmate/nanny/conscience, is always reliably on hand to sort things out. Because Teplitzky is keen to emphasise the huge physical scale of interiors as well as exteriors, Clemmie’s instant materialisation in them, as soon as she’s required, is supernatural.
Brian Cox often looks right – his make-up is designed by Cate Hall, the costumes by Bartholomew Cariss – and occasionally suggests a commemorative statue in the making. He is too conscious, however, that playing Churchill is a big deal: I wasn’t convinced that the aura of self-approval that clings to him was part of his characterisation rather than an expression of the actor’s confidence that he’s giving us a masterclass. A sequence in which Churchill kneels at his bedside to say his prayers is typical. He soon shifts from petitionary to declamatory mode, preferring the sound of his own voice to communing with God; he ends not with ‘Thy will be done’ but ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’. The line may be Glendower’s but Brian Cox gives the distinct impression that Churchill is his King Lear. Cox doesn’t just imitate Churchill’s famous vocal rhythms – he seems to be speechifying throughout. As a result, the climactic radio address on the evening of D-Day isn’t as stirring as it might be: it’s more of the same.
Miranda Richardson is admirable: her carriage and gestures give Clementine a welcome individuality; in their verbal skirmishes, she strikes a well-judged balance between a strong sense of duty, exasperation and regretful disenchantment with her petulant, otherwise-engaged husband. Most of the supporting acting is par for the course although John Slattery and Danny Webb both play intelligently. I liked Steven Cree in the small role of a military captain who gives the Allied high command crucial weather forecasts for the English Channel. James Purefoy is a surprisingly imposing and fleshy George VI. He and Churchill have an interminable conversation in which the latter is eventually dissuaded from having them both embark for Normandy together – and the interminability isn’t down to the king’s speech impediment.
18 June 2017
