British Director Joe Wright has admitted his replay of Churchill is relevant to current America: The director claims to be heartened by the growing resistance to the president’s increasing tyranny.
But the connection is deeper and more troublesome. Wright’s Churchill is specifically inflected into a figure of Trump populism. The film is a defence of Trump. As no responsible person could say Trump is Churchillian, Gary Oldman’s — however brilliant — performance serves to reduce Churchill to Trump.
The most serious malfeasance is the PM’s visit to the London Underground. On the brief trip to the next station, Westminster, Churchill meets a carload of Ordinary Citizens, overcomes their awe, learns their names, cracks a few jokes, finds out about them, and hears their full-throated rejection of any peace over war against Hitler. He learns the voiceless citizenry happen to agree with him!
The encounter reverses Churchill’s decision to join the freedom-sacrificing pacifiers. Instead he stands firm, rallies the government and — spoiler alert— five years later defeats the Nazis.
The underground scene is not based in Churchill’s real life at all. Instead it derives from Shakespeare’s Henry V, when on the eve of Agincourt Hal walks incognito among his motley army connecting to his roots and drawing strength from them.
Wright’s version is stilted and dangerous. Instead of poetry and sincerity it seems like an animated Communist poster, all the faces radiant and of one heart and mind to risk a nations’ population in an uncertain war. Indeed in this idealistic vision the one black man on the train — indeed, in the film, and possibly in the England of that time — can complete Churchill’s classic poetic quotation. This truly “fake” scene portrays Churchill as a populist, just like our Donnie! He alone knows what The People want, hears their needs and resolutely serves their purpose in the face of conventional politics and against the elite (the class he of course enjoys).
Even the Churchill traits here that have historic basis are by that fake scene mobilized to present Churchill as the Trump kind of leader. As a serial flip-flopper, he’s rejected by his own party. He’s bullying, impatient and insulting to his staff. His career is pocked with spectacular failures, with Gallipoli standing in for Trump’s many — of course, personally profitable — bankruptcies. He takes corrective advice from his First Lady, the fashionably done-up Clementine evoking the combo Melanka. Where others operate by knowledge and principle, he goes by his — here prosthetic — gut.
His daily 4 p.m. nap evokes Trump’s sliver of a work-day that punctuate his golf breaks. In fact, Churchill worked two full days every day by taking an extra sleep, shower and breakfast within each 24-hour period. This Churchill’s explanation — “I work late” — doesn’t cover that. It instead shows Churchill Trump-like in seeming to be lazy by grabbing an extra break.
In short, this Churchill serves to valourize a leader who in these surface particulars is like Trump: quirky, disliked, a political outsider, unpredictable (to the point of frightening the king), but with a preternatural dedication to and insight into The People.
What’s omitted is the very essence of Churchill, everything that distinguishes him from Trump: his massive education and scholarship, his brilliant research, his idealistic, humane eloquence, his long and varied political experience and his rock-solid moral character. Sure, if you set aside all the ways Churchill was the antithesis to Trump, then you can make Trump seem like another Churchill, an outsider populist unfairly maligned by everyone with sense and responsibility, who are here played as treasonous cowards.
Wright’s Churchill goes wrong in another scene. Churchill knew his Shakespeare. Churchill would NEVER say “Lead on, Macduff.” The verb is “lay on,” as in hand to hand (not Trump’s foot in mouth) combat.
This undercurrent may explain the film’s weird opening shots: the Nazi army and military equipment in massive uniform array. In bringing us into the action, the element Wright chooses to characterize the time is not landscape, city or characters, but the threat of a war. The images connote Little Rocket Man.
The first reference to Churchill is the shot of his empty seat in parliament. Under the threat of war, the leadership is a vacancy into which the people’s saviour will by our good fortune slip. However unpopular, unconventional, unattractive, he will prove the right man at the right time and place. Really.
As the film opens on the Nazi threat, it closes on the Churchillian resolution. And of course it’s another distortion. “He mobilized the English language and sent it off to war” was not the wisdom of Lord Halifax but of Edward Murrow, later quoted by John Kennedy. But why quibble at misrepresentation and more egregious lies when it’s in service of a larger (or in this case, “fake”) truth? Perhaps in one specific the film’s parallel offers hope: Five months after the war the public voted Churchill out of office.
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