Film review: Churchill

Set in the run up to D-Day, long after his nation-rallying “Fight them on the beaches” speech, it finds Winston haunted instead by the beaches of Gallipoli, the disastrous First World War campaign he orchestrated 30 years earlier when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.

Played by Brian Cox, this version of Churchill is a depressed, boozy, bumbling liability who is being forced to confront his own obsolescence towards the end of a war in which the Allied cause has been overtaken by the Americans and the leadership of General Eisenhower (Mad Men’s John Slattery). Convinced the planned Normandy landings are going to be a disaster, Churchill makes his misgivings clear to an unimpressed Eisenhower and spends the rest of the movie stomping around the cabinet war rooms drawing up alternative plans and making insane-sounding suggestions.

It’s an interesting side of him to dramatise, but the film botches its execution. Historian-turned-screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann’s script may attempt to contextualise Churchill’s state of mind by teasing out ideas about the demise of the British Empire, but it’s also full of terrible lines designed to ratchet up the conflict between Churchill and Eisenhower.

This isn’t helped by the attempts of director Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man) to force its darker elements into the framework of a more inspirational redemption story. At the centre is Cox, who looks the part without the prosthetics getting in the way and is good at tapping into the performative aspects of political leadership. Sadly, his domineering approach can’t raise the material above the level of caricature.