Busy
VERDICT: (Four stars out of five) Thundering good
The story at the heart of this compelling film is true, or mostly true, but if it weren’t you’d think it had been machine-made to appeal to a British audience. After all, it focuses on two of our three major concerns: World War II and the weather. Only the royal family is missing.
Adapted by David Haig from his own stage hit, it stars Andrew Scott as Group Captain James Stagg, the brave Scottish meteorologist who advises General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) not to launch Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France, on Monday, June 5, 1944.
That is the date Eisenhower has designated as D-Day and even a brief delay could be disastrous. Such a colossal military undertaking cannot possibly be kept secret from the Germans for much longer. But Stagg’s analysis of the available data has convinced him that a major storm is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean, heading towards Normandy.
Launching the invasion under such conditions, with waves potentially as high as 15 feet, will be even more disastrous than delaying it. He suggests waiting until June 18, by which time things should have calmed down again.
At command headquarters in Hampshire, Eisenhower and other top brass are stunned, especially the ruthless General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis, who pronounces his Rs as Ws with enormous enthusiasm), who almost delivers a beating.
A delay of fourteen days is unthinkable. The invasion will fail. “Do you want to be personally responsible for losing this war, Captain Stagg?” Monty rages. The question, not that he has any chance of saying it, is rhetorical.
So the title of the film, and the play before it, is neatly ambiguous. High and low pressure systems put almost unbearable pressure on Stagg, compounded by conflicting advice from a meteorologist in the American camp, Colonel Irving Krick (Chris Messina), who prefers to predict the weather by examining patterns dating back to 1904 and confidently declares that all will be well on June 5.
Andrew Scott is reliably excellent as the reserved, rather charmless Scottish meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg
Damian Lewis as the belligerent General Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery, who ‘pronounces his Rs as Ws with enormous enthusiasm’
Krick pompously adds that he accompanied Eisenhower through North Africa and was correct in his predictions every time. To which a contemporary response might consist of invoking Caroline Aherne’s immortal Mediterranean weather girl in The Fast Show, who – while slapping fat suns on the map – shouts, ‘Scorchio! Schorchio! Schorchio!’ Stagg only drily notes that Krick was fortunate to be able to operate under such “stable” conditions.
It’s easy to understand why all this unfolded so rivetingly on stage. It’s theatrical rather than cinematic, and, heaven knows, dialogue about millibars and cumulus clouds doesn’t necessarily get the pulse racing.
And yet, even though a subplot about Stagg’s lovely wife going into labor at the height of the drama seems a bit contrived, and even though we all know the outcome of D-Day (which in the event was postponed just 24 hours after Sir James rightly anticipated a respite from the storm), director Anthony Maras manages to turn the story into a bona fide thriller.
It also starts grippingly and very cinematically, with overhead shots of dead and dying American troops, victims of Exercise Tiger, the catastrophic April 1944 rehearsal at Slapton Sands in Devon that left more than 700 men dead.
Six weeks later, Eisenhower is still haunted by the memory. But does that make him more or less dependent on Stagg’s advice? He prepares two declarations, one to announce a triumph, the other to announce disaster.
To thrillingly recreate real events like these, the acting and writing must be perfect. They are. Scott is reliably excellent as the reserved, rather charmless Stagg, ably supported by Fraser, Lewis, Messina and Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s confidante Kay Summersby, his Irish personal secretary and, rumor had it, lover.
Historians are divided on this. What is not in doubt is the height of Eisenhower and that of Stagg. In the film, the general towers over the captain. In reality it was the other way around. Stagg’s eldest son Peter, born in 1941, inherited from his father what we might call his height under the circumstances. At a mighty 6ft 1in, he played rugby union for Scotland and the British Lions. What a family. What a story.
Pressure hits theaters tomorrow
