Lone Scherfig (2016)
The Danish director Lone Scherfig enjoyed a well-deserved success with An Education (2009). The film offered a clear, convincing and entertaining insight into the social and sexual mores of England in the early 1960s, before the decade had actually got swinging. Since then Scherfig has become a sort of naturalised British film-maker. She directed two episodes of the American TV drama The Astronaut Wives Club in 2015 but all three of her cinema features since An Education have been set in this country – One Day (2011), The Riot Club (2014), now Their Finest. Her latest looks set to be another critical and commercial success, and it’s fair to say that Lone Scherfig has achieved what she set out to achieve. It’s also a shame: her aim in Their Finest is evidently to beat home-grown directors at their own game of advertising wry, self-satisfied Britishness.
The setting is London, in the early months of the Blitz. Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton), a young Welsh woman recently arrived in the capital, is interviewed by the Ministry of Information’s head of film (Richard E Grant), and gets a job writing scripts for propaganda shorts. Catrin’s husband Ellis (Jack Huston) is a struggling war artist – unable either to fight because of a leg wound from the Spanish Civil War, or to sell or exhibit his paintings. The MOI send Catrin to interview twin sisters who sailed their father’s boat, the ‘Nancy Starling’, to take part in the Dunkirk evacuation. The girls didn’t actually make it to Dunkirk (the boat engine packed up and they were towed back to port by a tug) but it’s the thought that counts, and Catrin presents her bosses with a scenario that she’s written, based on the incident. Her story is soon revealed as more fictional than she’d claimed but Catrin keeps her job and the project is developed into a full-length feature. Catrin has virtually all the good ideas, though her two male colleagues, Raymond Parfitt (Paul Ritter) and his protégé Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), are the credited scriptwriters of ‘The Nancy Starling’. The producer is the Korda-esque Gabriel Baker (Henry Goodman). The cast of this film-within-the-film includes, with reluctance, Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), a former matinee idol fallen on hard professional times. A late addition – at the request of the Ministry of War, to give the picture transatlantic appeal – comes in the form of a Norwegian-American fighter pilot (Jake Lacy), who can’t act. Catrin and the pessimistic, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Tom Buckley develop a sparky, often antagonistic working relationship. During location filming in Devon, the relationship becomes something more.
As might be expected with this plot, there’s a good deal of pounding of typewriters. Their insistent rhythm echoes a good deal of the chirpy acting in evidence, so pleased with itself that you’d think the cast of Their Finest had won the War. I knew in advance who was in the film but it was only watching the opening credits that I realised the full horror of what lay ahead: Helen McCrory, Rachael Stirling, Richard E Grant, Henry Goodman – the list of unfavourite actors seemed endless. To add insult to injury, not only does Eddie Marsan, as Ambrose Hilliard’s Polish immigrant agent Sammy, get killed off quickly but McCrory, as Sammy’s feisty-bossy sister, survives to replace him, and to lick Ambrose into shape. As the unnamed Secretary for War, Jeremy Irons delivers a hateful, isn’t-this-amusing sarcastic cameo. I reckoned there had to be a few compensations – people I like – in small roles. In the event, I spotted just one – Ellie Haddington, who’s on screen for about five seconds, as Catrin’s landlady.
Kate Muir in the Times has described Gemma Arterton as ‘perfect’ as Catrin and so she is – perfect in the sense of complete and finished. Arterton is beautiful, proficient and wholly unsurprising. Everything she does, including grief and anger, is nicely circumscribed: nothing too much – that wouldn’t be British. As Tom Buckley, Sam Claflin doesn’t suggest a man ‘born in a pub’. That’s another character’s description of Tom and it seems clear from the script that he’s meant to be choleric, restless, rumpled. Claflin is none of these: he wears spectacles in order to disguise, slightly, his conventional good looks. He conveys well, though, a cynic’s troubled amazement at falling in love – he’s also good at getting across that scriptwriting for Tom Buckley is a job, with the implications of wearying routine that that implies. Bill Nighy has a ball playing the posh, droll has-been Ambrose Hilliard and he’s unarguably expert doing this kind of turn. I’d like to enjoy his performance as much as Nighy does but the character, in conception and execution, drives me up the wall – especially when I’m sitting in an audience primed to chortle at every illustration of Ambrose’s fathomless egocentricity (typical ack-taw), and to switch to an equally audible reverent hush when he eventually turns serious, in order to cheer up the bereft heroine (typical good egg really).
Catrin is bereft because Tom has been killed in an accident on the film set. His death is a shock because of its suddenness and because it’s caused by a falling lighting rig rather than a German bomb. For the most part, though, the bits of Their Finest designed to attest dramatic substance are merely offensive – ‘designed’ is the word. A shot of a mutilated corpse in a mortuary, a ‘fucking’ or two in the script – these aren’t indications of depth or seriousness, they’re just different formula requirements. Catrin is caught up in a bombing raid; she picks herself up, looks in horror at the corpses lying around her, and makes her way back to the poky Bloomsbury flat that she and Ellis share. He tells her she looks terrible. Lone Scherfig’s idea of Gemma Arterton looking terrible is to give her laddered stockings. It’s rich that a picture as thoroughly market-oriented as this one pokes fun at ‘The Nancy Starling’ being adjusted to meet US audience requirements (conversion from black-and-white into rather putrid colour, a more palatable ending). You can’t deny that Rachel Portman’s music for Their Finest is a suitable accompaniment to the enterprise.
Perhaps the most flagrant example of the film’s button-pushing comes in the development of Ellis Cole. At first, he seems OK – a bit self-pitying but certainly in love with Catrin. Since it’s clear that a strong mutual attraction between her and Tom Buckley is bound to bloom from their prickly early exchanges, you wonder how the problem of Ellis is going to be solved – he seems like an air-raid-fatality-in-waiting, to leave Catrin free to find consolation with Tom. However, Ellis doesn’t like it when Catrin first becomes the breadwinner, then more interested in her own work than in the exhibition he’s finally got – maybe he’s a male chauvinist who’s not worth her staying with anyway? He proves it, when Catrin catches him in bed with another woman. What’s more, it transpires they were never legally married anyway – Catrin wore a wedding ring and called herself Mrs Cole for the sake of appearances. (Most people had very old-fashioned ideas in those days, you see.) It’s this level of mechanical calculation, in combination with the butch MOI person overplayed by Rachael Stirling, that’s earned Their Finest praise in some quarters for its ‘feminist’ angle.
The screenplay by Gaby Chiappe (who’s written exclusively for television until now) is adapted from a novel by Lissa Evans. This is called Their Finest Hour and a Half and the abbreviation of the film’s title is worth noting. Although what’s on screen often chimes with the jocose ring of the book’s title, I’d guess the people behind Their Finest wanted to avoid not only confusion with the American action (non-war) drama The Finest Hours, released in early 2016, but also the impression of a comedy and of sending up Winston Churchill’s phrase. Although Lissa Evans’s title announces her particular storyline more clearly than Their Finest does, the loss of ‘hour’ may also prove helpful in distinguishing this film from the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour, scheduled to appear later this year.
The acting in ‘The Nancy Starling’ isn’t right: it’s intentionally lame but still too naturalistic for the period. In particular, the actors playing working-class characters sound as if they might themselves have started life in the same social boat – an impression seldom given in actual British cinema of the time. A signal exception to that rule was Kathleen Harrison, who appears at the start of Their Finest in a clip from A Call for Arms!, a 1940 MOI short describing women’s work in a munitions factory. (This was also one of the hors d’oeuvres at the recent BFI screening of Millions Like Us.) Lone Scherfig shows a cinema audience bored stiff by A Call for Arms!; we, like them, are meant to find it laughable when the Harrison character, who has just learned that her son is missing in action, assures her sympathetic supervisor in the factory that she’ll feel better ‘once I’ve had a nice cuppa tea’. Yes, this is, at one level, ridiculous yet there’s more human truthfulness in Kathleen Harrison’s brief appearance than in most of what follows in Their Finest. It’s infuriating to see proper pride in the British war effort between 1939 and 1945 distorted into this smug, falsely inflated nostalgia.
2 May 2017
