Clear Skies
It may be a dad movie, but it’s a well acted dad movie backstopped by an eerie sense of history repeating.
Pressure
Director: Anthony Maras • Writers: Anthony Maras, David Haig, based on the play by Haig
Starring: Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Chris Messina, Damian Lewis
UK / France • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong May 28 • IIA
Grade: B+
Back in 2018, one of the “kids” out there sitting nearby at a screening of Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old wondered aloud why it was (allegedly) so important Jackson got the film finished by… 2018. I don’t know what to say to that; look it up if you must. But the point is that one of the deadliest conflicts in global history may as well be Ancient Egypt now, despite the underlying issues remaining oh so current. So with a very real fear of fascism reigning, again, it’s not surprising that Anthony Maras’s Second World War drama Pressure is being released in time to be in cinemas on June 6 for the 81st anniversary of the Normandy landings.
Based on actor-playwright David Haig’s drama, Pressure is one of those movies that shines a light on a forgotten or overlooked story from our collective, glorious history of armed warfare – like the hotel manager who harboured refugees during the genocide in Hotel Rwanda, or the photographer who exposed Japanese atrocities in Dead to Rights, or (duh) the righteous factory fraudster in Schindler’s List. Pressure focuses its attention on one of the most well documented offensives of the WWII, D-Day, but also on the most left-field, seemingly random factor of the campaign – the weather – and somehow draws existential drama out of it. This is your dad’s favourite movie, and he’ll probably watch it on a double bill with Nurermberg. That doesn’t make it any less engaging.
Sciencing the shit out of WWII
Roughly 72 hours before Operation Neptune is set to launch, Allied forces commander General Dwight D Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser, doing a tremendous Ike) summons RAF Group Captain and meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) to headquarters and puts him in charge of weather forecasting for D-Day. Ike’s probably sending the troops to France anyway but he wants to make sure conditions on the notoriously wretched North Sea/English Channel are as optimal as possible. Stagg – dour, humourless, very Scottish and above all scientific – inherits a small army of weathermen, including Ike’s personal favourite, American Irving P Krick (Chris Messina) already hard at work predicting the winds and swells for June 4. Ike and Krick have been together since North Africa and the Mediterranean, and Eisenhower trusts his judgement. Winston Churchill, however, trusts Stagg’s. Krick insists it will be blue skies in early June, like it has been since 1879 or so, while Stagg points out an anomalistic, but troubling storm brewing in the North Atlantic and suggests postponing the invasion. The friction between Krick’s backward-looking (kind of like AI) expectations and Stagg’s interpretive, science-focused ones are Pressure’s primary source of tension, where the meatiest parts rest on the empirical rivalry and (eventually) mutual respect between the two. This is a film cut from the finest head-butting mission movie cloth, and Scott and Messina spin gold from the hay.
Pressure is Maras’s latest foray into real-life conflict drama; he may be best known for the 26/11 Mumbai attacks thriller Hotel Mumbai and like he did in that film, he and co-writer Haig scoop massive dramatic licence from history’s rich dramatic vein. No shit the unlikeliest white-knuckle action of the year comes from watching meteorologists release weather balloons and read minute-to-minute pressure gauge numbers that could impact the future of Europe. We know what happened on June 6, but watching Ike and Krick’s death stares at Stagg when June 4 begins as a gorgeous sunny day morph into ghostly white “Oh, shit” realisation when the wind kicks up and rain starts. It’s a fist-pump moment in a film that needs to manufacture heroes and villains on a micro level.
The cast helps pull it all together. Fraser cuts a much more imposing figure than the real Eisenhower did, but it makes for good storytelling, particularly in moments when the weight of past wartime decisions – and their resulting casualties – seem to bear down on a man that really takes up space. Damian Lewis does a smashing job as British army commander Bernard Montgomery, who’s eager to start busting Nazis before the Germans notice hundreds of ships and planes massing on the English coast, and who tries to push Eisenhower towards saying “Fuck the weather, let’s go!” But it’s Scott that is Pressure’s emotional core as well as its intellectual one. He absolutely nails the Keep Calm and Carry On ethos that’s anathema to Messina’s in-your-face Krick, while letting just enough cracks appear in his controlled façade to make Stagg human. Sure, Pressure can smack of British Exceptionalism and American Saviour mythologising but it’s efficient filmmaking that doesn’t wear out its welcome and feels sadly current – and a low-key celebration of science. Happy Father’s Day.