In terms of both narrative and nuance, Churchill has a limited scope. Director Jonathan Teplitzky and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann follow the English prime minister (Brian Cox) over the course of several days leading up to the D-Day invasion. Although that 1944 mission — dubbed Operation Overlord — was ultimately a success, Winston Churchill had his doubts, to the chagrin of the Allied High Command.
The film spends a lot of time dressing down its subject — Churchill argues with everyone in his immediate circle — yet Churchill celebrates him anyway. This incongruity is frustrating, and Teplitzky deepens it with one overwrought, predictable choice after another.
When we are first introduced to the title character, he is standing on a beach. The tide is red — at least in Churchill’s imagination, where he worries that the invasion will lead to a bloodbath. Churchill meets with generals — Eisenhower (John Slattery) and Montgomery (Julian Wadham) — begging them to find an alternative to a full-on assault.
Although everyone else, including King George (James Purefoy), agrees that it is the best shot at defeating Germany, Churchill protests and bellows, more out of ego than out of concern for Allied forces, turning Churchill into the study of a man facing encroaching obsolescence. Meanwhile, Churchill’s wife, Clementine (Miranda Richardson), struggles to shape her husband into the man her country needs him to be, going so far as to work behind his back to stop his foolhardy ideas.
As John Lithgow does in his portrayal of Churchill on The Crown, Cox plays the character as an aging, stubborn blowhard who can’t fathom why anyone might not take him seriously. Unlike that Netflix series, however, the perspective of Churchill is decidedly male-centric. Cox’s Churchill is so arrogant and contemptuous of modern military strategy that there is a perverse satisfaction in seeing Slattery’s Eisenhower knock him down a peg.
Teplitzky betrays his sympathy for Churchill, filming Cox with seemingly endless, fawning slow-motion shots, burnished by evocative shadows. Churchill is capable of listening to reason, but only insofar as it aligns with his own point of view — or comes from the king, the only person to whom he’s deferential. After temper tantrums and self-pitying scenes, the film climaxes in the prime minister’s rousing radio address of June 6, 1944, celebrating D-Day. Suggesting that the speech justified Churchill’s abundant flaws, the film contorts itself into a biopic of yet another Great Man.
The supporting cast is lively and clever, which only serves to underscore the film’s limited curiosity about its own subject. At one point, there is a heated argument between Churchill and his wife, ending with Clementine shrieking to herself, before pulling herself together a moment later. Churchill, on the other hand, is so upset that he enters into a protracted funk, lying in bed for hours on end.
We’re meant to pity him — Teplitzky frames Churchill like a fallen warrior — yet Clementine has the more thankless task. Indeed, the women in Churchill exist primarily as sounding boards for the men, with barely any agency of their own. (The historical Churchill was guilty of this, too: in his own memoir of the Second World War, his wife receives only a single mention.) If this film had more sympathy for all its players, it would have been a welcome corrective.
There’s a personal component to Churchill’s reluctance about D-Day, as we learn from the film, which shows us its subject recalling the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War, in which the English suffered catastrophic casualties. Eisenhower and others are quick to point out that a lot has changed in 30 years of warfare, but Churchill is too stubborn to acknowledge it.
He may finally rise to the occasion over the course of the film, finding the necessary poise and leadership that Britain needs. But if you read between the lines, Churchill really seems to be about a man who is fondly remembered by default, and because he was propped up by people stronger than he was.
Biography, at its most useful, disabuses us from myth, but Churchill has no such ambitions. As both history and entertainment, it’s a drag.
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Churchill releases in the UAE on June 8.
