Their Finest [Review by Haus]

We reviewed Their Finest at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film is currently slated to open March 24. 

Even seventy-some years on, the Second World War justifiably continues to tempt filmmakers as a sort of hatchery for authenticity, purpose, and meaning. Such efforts typically cluster about two poles: Either plunging into the thick dark mess of combat, or telling more restrained tales of quiet and unsung sacrifice on the home front. To properly remind us of the true horrors of war, the thinking goes, generally requires the former, and a somber tone to boot. Their Finest rings the same bell in a very different way, with a beautiful and often hilarious adaptation of Lissa Evans’s novel Their Finest Hour and a Half.

Former Bond girl Gemma Arterton plays Catrin Cole, a young Welsh woman in London. Catrin’s application for a government secretarial position surprisingly morphs into a screenwriting job, where she is to craft “slop” (that is, women’s dialogue) for Britain’s civilized-propagandist wartime films. Eager to help support her injured husband –- a grim war veteran turned artist who’s finding it tough to peddle his colorless swaths of Wartime Downer on canvas –- she quietly takes the job and gets to work, joining a couple of hard-boiled and epoch-appropriate mysoginistic chaps in the writer’s den. Most prominent of these is Buckley (Sam Claflin). There’s a little hint of will-they-or-won’t-they, since they clearly get along, but that motor never gets going because she’s married and proper and it’s the forties. But the two soon settle into a slick repartee, as she tests the limits of her position and tries (in what we today see as a very zeitgeisty way) to advance the roles of women in the film and the Ministry. 

This is all set against the backdrop of daily life in London during the Blitz. Friends and neighbors, favorite stores, and pretty much everything else can be there one day and gone the next in the stochastic, catastrophic, booming footfalls of a war fought nightly in the skies. Some evenings pass quietly while others roar with close-in blasts -– and the bad nights punctuate the film without rhyme or reason, successfully fashioning in us a baseline omnipresent dread that some explosive cruelty might at any moment befall a favorite character. It’s masterfully done.

And each morning, picking their way through the latest harvest of carnage, we see the expressionless citizens who’ve outwardly adapted to this new normal. Scripts must be written and life must continue, even though your whole block could blow up and anyone could effectively drop off the roster at any time. Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

Catrin soon finds herself working on a propaganda picture, dramatizing (and tuning up) a true story of twin sisters who joined the famous Dunkirk boatlift and ferried stranded soldiers to safety. This film within a film –- shown through brief and playful snippets of imagined scenes that take shape as the script does -– is done well and sparingly, keeping its parent story moving along but never overwhelming it. There’s also an interesting subtext of opportunity during wartime: As more and more people are either shipped off to the front or killed in the bombing, jobs become available to those who might never otherwise have had a shot. Spun properly, as this film does, this paints an unusually nuanced picture of wartime society. 

To the pleasures of a well-executed period piece, Their Finest adds a cheeky gloss of meta-analysis. It’s a movie about how movies get made, which gives director Lone Scherfig license to trot out every film-biz caricature and to playfully heckle the industry in general. (This, of course, is total catnip to a Sundance audience.) She seizes the chance to double-dip on the Hollywood sendup mid-picture, when Jeremy Irons breezes through as the Secretary of War and explains how to make the Dunkirk script more appealing to an American audience.

Their Finest is a deeply funny film at times, but as it so frankly deals with death and war, unquestionably a very serious and moving one as well. Scherfig’s tight juxtaposition of humor and tragedy is unusual, but it works.

As do the performances. Arterton and Claflin are well matched. Bill Nighy steals the picture as a self-important and hilarious aging actor, while Jake Lacy plays a wide-grinning American who supplies similar comic relief.

It’s a shame that the stills and trailers and general muted palette will almost certainly suggest this is a soft little picture to be enjoyed with a cup of tea on the sofa. Not so. This is a movie to see on the big screen — not because aliens are blowing up a CGI Washington or whatever, but because it’s a tremendously powerful film and it legitimately deserves your attention, immersion, and emotion.

Haus Verdict: A beautiful, crushing, and uplifting period piece that’s moving but never maudlin. See it.

Their Finest is screening at Sundance Film Festival, and opens March 24 everywhere.

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