Tropic Sprockets / Churchill

By Ian Brockway

The opening of “Churchill” by director Jonathan Teplitsky is quite compelling. During the weeks before June 1944, PM Churchill (Brian Cox) takes a walk along a beach. Suddenly the oyster-gray water turns bright red. Churchill is paralyzed with horror and he drops to his knees. 

It is the single most effective scene.

The bluntly-titled film is about Winston Churchill’s fears of the Normandy Invasion, a portrait of his thoughts and feelings. It is nicely rendered with crisp cinematography by David Higgs. It is painfully thin on psychology and plot however, reducing the leonine Churchill into an angry barking man who broods.

Here, the legendary figure is up against it. He doesn’t want a D-Day offensive on Normandy Beach, fearing it will be a disaster: the enemy will surely cover the sand with a blanket of bombs, not to mention the warplanes leading of course to catastrophic losses of young men. This is after all what happened in the Battle of Gallipoli during WWI.

Eisenhower (John Slatterly), Montgomery (Julian Wadham), and Smuts (Richard Durden) humor him along but ultimately tell him the news: his ideas are archaic and out of touch. They are forging ahead with Operation Overlord which includes Normandy.

The PM roars, shouting orders at his secretary, Helen Garrett (Ella Purnell). At the dinner table he rages at his wife Clem (Miranda Richardson), and becomes a comical cloud of thick and billowing cigar smoke. 

Beyond this bloody bellowing there is little else.

James Purefoy appears as a bland King George VI. As we know from “The King’s Speech,” His Majesty is more than his speech impediment.

We see the bulldog-shaped man stomp, shout and fret. He bends at the knees for God to intervene and cancel Normandy, giving an overblown dramatic speech. 

But all we get is the most minimal of drama and the surface treatment is more in keeping with a TV movie than a theatrical film. The crashing dinnerware brings to mind a soap opera.

One wishes for a richer creation of the man, by all accounts a deep and complicated leader. Sadly, in “Churchill” we are presented with only an image instead of a soul. 

Write Ian at [email protected]

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