Churchill (2017)

Churchill is a film about aging.

Certainly it's a character study of the man, but the particulars of the story concern themselves with the moment in Churchill's wartime leadership where he is a spent force, fixated on the mistakes in his past and unable to understand that the world is not the same place it used to be.

Brian Cox's portrayal of Churchill is impressive. There are times where he embodies the role so well that you have to squint to see the joins. Unfortunately this distracted me from fully enjoying the film I was constantly having to struggle between my image of the real Churchill and the performance I was seeing on screen, and I wasn't able to invest myself enough in the story to avoid noticing the inflections that were more Brian Cox than Winston Churchill (or perhaps that's less a problem with Cox's performance and more a problem with the film not fully demanding my attention).

However, in terms of the physicality, the way Cox inhabits Churchill's large, aging frame, there's little to fault. His portrayal carries a ring of verisimilitude - at least from my knowledge of Churchill.

The other actors generally do a decent enough job - although I wasn't quite convinced by Julian Wadham's Montgomery (was he really that effete?) and James Purefoy's George VI seemed off. Miranda Richardson and Ella Purnell were really the other standouts, supplying much of the emotional backbone of the film.

The production felt stagy - in fact, it felt as if it was originally a play that had been adapted to the cinema by throwing in a few exterior shots involving a bit of driving. Nothing suggested it needed a big screen experience. Direction was competent, with some visual flair, but overall it felt lacking in the moving picture department.

The script itself had nice touches of wit and did a decent job with the characterisation. From my basic knowledge of the period and the people, there was little that rang untrue from a historical point of view (although I'm sure somewhere there's a Churchill historian standing outside a cinema with a cardboard sign reading 'Down with this sort of thing').