Churchill

'CHURCHILL' was directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and stars Brian Cox, Miranda Richardson and John Slattery. ?Fearful of repeating the invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, Winston Churchill attempts to stop the planned invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only the support of Churchill's wife, Clementine, can halt the prime minister's physical and mental collapse.

I desperately wanted to love this movie. I really did. This is a fascinating period of our history and would have loved to see a great depiction of Churchill's perception of it on our screens for the world to enjoy. Alas, I did not. It's a melodramatic mess that has Brian Cox's unfathomable acting ability keeping it barely alive. The only other positive I can conceive is the splendid speech at the end because the rest of the movie was messy, incoherent and, the worst sin of all, boring.

This movie's structure is were it falters greatly for me. While the plot and point are clear, it doesn't feel like one flowing narrative. The scenes feel messy and out of place(when they aren't) and it overall doesn't appear like much effort went into the creation of the story for this film.

I wouldn't usually do an entire section of a review on the direction but that is the main way this movie falters, at least for me. 90% of the scenes in this movie are shot, acted and scored in the fashion that makes it seem like the fate of the universe rests in these characters words and makes the whole movie stupidly melodramatic. This style works for brief moments in the film but fails overall. A much less dramatic, more relaxed style that still displayed Churchill's eccentric nature would have sufficed but instead they opted for a melodramatic mess,

Brian Cox was honestly great in this movie and I bought every second of his performance. I don't agree that he reaches Oscar levels but I do believe he gets quite close. Miranda Richardson and John Slattery both do fine as Clementine Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower respectively but neither of them come close to Cox's undeniable skill.

The costume and set design for this movie was really good and felt genuine to the era. The cinematography is a very strange subject. On the one hand, it is overly dramatic and feels very weird in scenes that don't require the world to be resting on them. On the other hand, there are a few scenes, like the masterfully written speech, where this format works stupidly well and is very, very effective. So I am pretty torn with this format of cinematography but I feel that it is pretty weak as a whole package.

As good as Cox and the speech are, this movie is probably not worth your time overall. I don't recommend you watch it and I'll rate it a measly 3 Glasses of Scotch out of 10.

Churchill is depicted as a diminished, drooling buffoon and many who remember him as one of the great names and leaders during WWII will find this movie intolerable. At the end of the film after the credits you see some weaselly disclaimer about how the movie, although based on real people, may or may not have presented events as they really happened.

And so this movie marches on with its hit-piece agenda and the writer should be ashamed to marginalize such a noted figure with such a self-indulgent point of view. Did the writer teleport back in time and hover like Patrick Swayze in a room? Scene after scene shows Churchill as an anxious, alcoholic insecure man with no counterpoints to show him in a leadership role. I'm all for a certain angle for movies and political news shows, but this went too far and came off as an over-reach and simply an ego trip for a script.

Historical accuracy aside, the movie fails in other ways. Besides the cringe-worthy buffoon angle, the music was simply overbearing and not needed in half the scenes. I wish I had brought some noise-canceling headphones to the movie theater. Scene after scene I was praying for just the dialogue to speak for itself without the watery musical underbed to drive it. Scene after scene I was praying for silence. It's as if the music was in love with itself. Well some of us weren't.

John Slattery, who was excellent in Mad Men, was a total miscast. Slattery simply did not have the gravitas to carry the role of Eisenhower.

The movie's only saving grace was Brian Cox, answering the misguided casting call for a needy, spiraling performance of Churchill. He runs away with the role, although an unfair role at that. How much more serving and evergreen it would have been if the character given to him was not so one-sided. But Cox delivers and many of the actors in his scenes simply wither. This would be the time for a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Cox, so blistering was his distressed portrayal of Churchill. Two other actors to hold their own in the movie was Miranda Richardson, who played her role with stoic and steely grace, and the actor who played Smuts, an understated yet praiseworthy performance.

All in all if you care about history, and understand that leaders have both greatness and weakness in decision-making, this movie did not flesh out those layers. Instead it comes off slamming the persona of a historic figure.

On the basis that other reviewers have very adequately covered the glaring objections to this film I will keep this brief.

In an action packed life of 80 years involving 2 world wars and one other significant war (The Boer War), a momentous political career, a life filled with both failure as well phenomenal achievements, that the filmmakers should think it necessary to MAKE UP a story about Churchill seems like the pinnacle of perversity. It just defies any logic hitherto known to mankind.

"Poetic license" is nothing new in movie making. However this movie is more like a "license to kill", kill a man's reputation, kill the concept of history, and kill the truth. The preservation of actual history in the light of revisionism is difficult enough without the general public being exposed to downright lies to further confuse and deceive them.

I give this movie a 1 as a protest, in the probably forlorn hope that if enough people do the same to all movies that mess around with history, movie makers will get the message and steer their movies in a way that treats people and history responsibly.

This film may make a good story but it doesn't make good history.It is true to say that the casualties on the first day in Normandy equalled those on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.However it is difficult to give much credence to the notion of the film.Churchill would have been aware of the threat posed by the V rockets and the prospect that if nothing were done eventually the whole of Europe would have been overrun by Stalin's Soviet army.Also by this time Churchill had very little say in things and he was aware of this.He was not senile,which the film implies,but he was haunted by depression,which the film chooses not to mention.All told this is a film which is totally unworthy of the great man's memory.

This is a shambolic mess of a film with a one-sided view of Churchill, factual inaccuracies and appalling errors. The scriptwriter obviously did not read Field Marshal Alanbrooke's diaries or the many biographies of Churchill.

Even basic military details were so wrong, it is farcical. Couldn't the budget stretch to a military adviser? Monty addressing 20 or so soldiers? He went round addressing brigades, thousands of soldiers at a time.

The way that the characters addressed each other, the salutations, the lack of an equerry for the King, no PPS for Churchill...all utter rubbish.