Several years ago I read a very lovely biography of Winston Churchill called "The Last Lion" which sparked my immediate love of the great, wartime Prime Minister of England. It recounts his early life up until his political exile, those ten years before the onset of the Second World War. A part two would detail those years he spent as a conservative backbencher, disgraced and dismissed by his party over his views towards India and the Empire, and it is these two books that deeply influenced the creation of this great T.V. movie.
Albert Finney plays the great hero of old Britannia who claws himself up from laughing stock to foresighted genius as Germany begins secretly rearming. This is not an action film. For those who wish to see Churchill in action as the PM can watch the sequel (far less enjoyable, at least to me) starring Brendan Gleeson called "Into the Storm". This section of his life, however, is simply about dirty dealings and bathroom politics as Churchill, who believes it is his destiny to save his beloved England from destruction, fights tooth and nail with whatever talents he has in order to regain the power he lost after the Great War.
What is most enjoyable to me is that this film closely examines his personal life in his manor, Chartwell. Anyone who knows me well enough can tell you of my fondness of Mr. Churchill. My father regularly chides me because he wasn't able to see the Tower of London while visiting me abroad as I spent far too long in the Churchill War Museum examining letters between he and his wife, Clementine.
Aside from the major political actors like Baldwin, Desmond Morton (Jim Broadbent) and Ralph Wigram, the movie centers in on Churchill's personal life. Often, the scenes are structured around the trials of love that he combats with Clemmie (a very good Vanessa Redgrave), or his interactions with his staff. Many times we simply see him at home painting, dictating speeches, taking baths (always 97 degrees exactly) or building brick walls. As much as it is about him working to repair his name which was disgraced by his warmongering, failed excursions in WWI and his political flip-flopping, the movie is also about his ridiculous spending habits and what he does to keep his "black dog" of depression at bay.
Churchill was a terribly complex man: an amazing rhetorician, a workaholic, a snob, a bully, a romantic, an egotist, a military genius and the only man whom Hitler ever feared. Finney gives the best portrayal of the man that I have ever seen, blending the giddy schoolboy with the severe, doomsday politician. He is not exactly how I imagine Churchill to be, but I doubt there will be many who could ever capture him completely. That said, Finney is clever in avoiding the bull-heading, chain-smoking, alcoholic warmongering caricature trap that many before him have fallen into.
It is a very, very good production. The recreation of Britain in the interwar period is sublime, especially for what I imagine was an HBO or BBC production, and the thoroughness of the details of of Churchill's life, right down to the pet names he used, his work habits and the kind of cake he liked was really enjoyable for someone like me who knows more about him than I probably should.
It does pose some serious and great questions to the audience about the nature of war and what we ought to do to keep our nation safe, even at the sake of peace. Historians have long chided Baldwin and Chamberlain for their appeasement attitudes towards Germany, but there is a fantastic seen in the men's washroom where Baldwin (Derek Jacobi) confronts Churchill and explains his reasons for not stopping Hitler from creating his war machine.
I did not like, however, certain scenes in which the politics of the era had to be spelled out for the audience. That is alright in moderation, but considering its audience has had WWII shoved down its throats for decades I found them tedious and a bit condescending, but perhaps that is simply because I am an historian. I also disliked the way in which the film glorified the English people. It seemed to me that if the filmmaker was given the opportunity, if he was in the House of Commons, he would have listened to Churchill from the onset and that those who sided against him were purposefully ignorant to the information at hand about their Teutonic neighbors.
Those are rather small complaints, and were dwarfed by my love of Churchill and his great portrayal. Although I did not necessarily believe all of his actions or the relationship between he and Clemmie, I think that this is an outstanding production, set out to give dimension and different shades of gray to a man who has achieved an almost god-like status to the people of Britain. For that, I commend their spirit.
3.5/4
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