Their Finest (2016) [Blu-ray]
Comedy | Drama | Romance | War

Tagline: In The Fight For Freedom Everyone Played A Part

A British film crew attempts to boost morale during World War II by making a propaganda film after the Blitzkrieg. A former secretary, newly appointed as a scriptwriter for propaganda films, joins the cast and crew of a major production while the Blitz rages around them.

Storyline: During the London Blitz of World War II, Catrin Cole is recruited by the British Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will actually watch without scoffing. In the line of her new duties, Cole investigates the story of two young women who supposedly piloted a boat in the Dunkirk Evacuation. Although it proved a complete misapprehension, the story becomes the basis for a fictional film with some possible appeal. As Cole labors to write the script with her new colleagues such as Tom Buckley, veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard must accept that his days as a leading man are over as he joins the project. Together, this disparate trio must struggle against such complications such as sexism against Cole, jealous relatives, and political interference in their artistic decisions even as London endures the bombs of the enemy. In the face of those challenges, they share a hope to contribute something meaningful in this time of war and in their own lives. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 12, 2017 We like to think of people like Joseph Goebbels as being the chief propagandists of the Second World War, churning out material to brainwash his nation's people (and the people they had conquered). There's no denying that other countries also had their own propaganda units, including of course in the film industry. There are actually two kinds of movies that sprang from the United States that could be classified as propaganda, the fictional films that sought to either shock (Hitler's Children, Confessions of a Nazi Spy) or inspire (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, the second of which proves that efforts to "persuade" folks continued after the war had ended), and the documentary efforts like Why We Fight and Let There Be Light: John Huston's Wartime Documentaries. Britain had its own "forces" in this wartime cinematic fray, and those are the center of the charming and sometimes slyly humorous Their Finest. While the film might be faulted for combining comedy and tragedy in too sanguine a manner, it ably shows the pluck that got the Brits through the Blitz, all within the context of a ragtag troupe of movie makers who were seeking to buck up the spirits of the English in order to help them all "keep calm and carry on".

Without much ado, the film simply plops down Catrin Colt (Gemma Arterton) in the Ministry of Information, an organization which sounds suspiciously like something out of 1984, but which, unlike Orwell's formulation, is not positing that "war is peace" but instead "war is something to tolerate until peace comes along". Catrin thinks she's actually applying for a secretarial job, but Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) has read some of Catrin's newspaper work and thinks she would be a good addition to the team to help with short PSA like "infomercials" stuck between double features as interstitials ("when no one can escape", as another coworker offers). Later, Tom also suggests that Catrin might be an apt candidate to come up with more realistic dialogue for female characters, in just one of passing but probably unfortunately accurate allusions to the sexism of the day. (Another snippet addressing this same issue is evident when Catrin is informed in a matter of fact way that the Ministry "simply can't" pay her the same wages as the men, despite the fact that she's doing exactly the same work as the males are.)

Catrin starts writing pieces, where she comes into contact with hoity toity (and also hilariously insecure) actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), initially drawing the umbrage of Hilliard and the rest of the film's production crew when she (accurately) tells Hilliard he's missing the entire point of the film (after he asks to change some of his dialogue, which in turn would in fact ruin the intent of the film). In the meantime, though, the studio heads are insistent on some kind of major product which will raise people's spirits and make a buck. The perfect property seems to come down the line when an account is found of two sisters who supposedly helped with the Dunkirk evacuation. Catrin is sent to interview them, discovering two disheveled and perhaps mentally unstable sisters (twins, who seem surprised to alert Catrin to the fact they share the same birthday) who in fact had not helped with the Dunkirk evacuation but who were too afraid to correct the record, both out of embarrassment and due to the insistence of their alcoholic and abusive father.

Because the London film industry evidently works more or less exactly the way the Hollywood film industry does, the fact that there's no truth to the story of the girls helping with the Dunkirk evacuation means exactly zilch in terms of the film getting quickly greenlighted, with some expected casting of Hilliard bringing the fussy actor back into Catrin's arena. All of this plays out against a fractious relationship between Catrin and her husband Ellis (Jack Huston), an Air Raid Warden who can't join the "real" fight due to a lingering leg injury suffered in the Spanish Civil War. Ellis' real passion is mural painting, though his Thomas Hart Benton-ish pieces have been deemed too "depressing" and provocative to be plastered up on the sides of British buildings or on interior walls. When romantic sparks between Catrin and Tom seem to be nascent, the issues with making a film on a totally (or at least mostly) made up event seem to fade into the background.

Their Finest struggles a bit with focus, tending to lapse into vignette driven scenes rather than weaving everything together in a satisfactorily organic manner, but it's almost always charming and even fascinating at times. The large cast has a number of standouts, including Richard E. Grant and Henry Goodman as bigwigs at the studio, and a more or less cameo by Jeremy Irons as an official from the War Department. The film's production design rather winningly recreates both the horrors of the Blitz in London (one especially visceral scene finds Catrin herself caught in the maelstrom, with several victims strewn about around her) as well as some of the more beautiful natural environments away from the battle. The film probably tips over into tear jerker territory too much in its end game, but it also provides a nice depiction of that iconic British stiff upper lip that can seemingly weather any storm.

Their Finest encounters occasional stumbles in focus and tone, wobbling a bit uneasily between winking comedy meant to skewer pretentious show business types and more melodramatic, ostensibly tragic, data involving various characters, but it's such an interesting premise and the cast is so winning that the film's inherent ebullience tends to win out in the long run. The film's kind of prescient if tangential connection to this summer's expected blockbuster from Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk, may also add some extra interest for some film aficionados. Technical merits are strong, and Their Finest comes Recommended.

[CSW] -3.9- Four stories in one. First how the hardships and deaths affected everyone in 1940, when England was in the throes of fighting Nazism and being heavily bombed. Second the beginning signs of how the war started to change the role of women. Third the inner workings of what it took to actually make a propaganda film, and fourth the unrequited love story. The movie does not do a good job of weaving everything together in a satisfactorily cohesive manner, but each vignette is almost a standalone story in itself. And each vignette is almost always charming with the uplifting sentiment that is required of a positive propaganda film. So how do you put together a film-within-a-film, of stories-within-stories? You do it with a series of interwoven vignettes that at times look cheesy on purpose as all propaganda films did and fill them with clichés and sentiment, then through in a bit of a tear jerker towards the end and you have the weather any storm film called Their Finest.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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