Bren­dan Glee­son as WSC. (Susan All­nutt for HBO)

“Into the Storm,” a tele­vi­sion drama broad­cast by the BBC and HBO, pro­duced by Rid­ley Scott, directed by Thad­deus O’Sullivan, with Bren­dan Glee­son as Win­ston Churchill and Janet McTeer as Clemen­tine Churchill. Screen­play by Hugh Whitemore.

Then out spake brave Hor­atius,
The Cap­tain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die bet­ter
Than fac­ing fear­ful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the tem­ples of his gods…”
—“Hor­atius,” stanza XXVII in Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Bab­bing­ton Macaulay. Recited at the begin­ning and at the end of “Into the Storm.”

Here is a TV docu­d­rama pack­ing excep­tional hon­esty. An old man, at an age when most men retire (or in his time die), is handed com­mand of his nation, when no one else wants it, in the great­est cri­sis of her his­tory. They fight alone, save for their kith and kin, “the old lion and her lion cubs,” as he put it, “against hunters who are armed with deadly weapons.” And they win—only to see the old man dis­missed in the moment of victory.

The open­ing scene is Hen­daye, France, July 1945, where Churchill, his wife and daugh­ter Mary spend a week’s break between polling-day in the British Gen­eral Elec­tion and the start of the Pots­dam Con­fer­ence. Anx­ious for elec­tion returns (delayed for a fort­night to count the ser­vice vote) Churchill relives the past five years in a series of flash­backs. This is the film’s one jar­ring ele­ment: the back-and-forth occurs with­out obvi­ous tran­si­tion, and you have to remind your­self whether you are in the past or present. It is the only fault worth not­ing. The story is mas­sive, the action real, the his­tory hon­est, the dia­logue con­vinc­ing, the scenes art­ful, the act­ing superb.

Bren­dan Glee­son, who in life speaks with a heavy Irish brogue, is the best Churchill since Robert Hardy. He falls into none of the usual traps. Most Churchill imper­son­ators overdo the accent or the famous lisp, the V-sign or toi­let scenes or siren suits, the car­i­ca­tures painted by Lord Moran or Alan­brooke. Gleeson’s work was praised by WSC’s daugh­ter Lady Soames, the sternest of critics.

Hugh White­more, the sen­si­tive scriptwriter of Scott’s pre­ced­ing film, “The Gath­er­ing Storm,” has again helped by not load­ing the dia­logue with soar­ing rhetoric. “Papa spoke in pri­vate,” his daugh­ter says, “much as he did in pub­lic.” And here is the pri­vate Churchill, with doubts about win­ning, fears of the future, and faults of his own—for he was as human as any­one, freely admit­ted it, and often apol­o­gized for it, espe­cially to his wife.

Sev­eral quotes, though real enough, are taken out of time or con­text, but White­more blends them flaw­lessly into the story, and the stu­dent of Churchill’s words doesn’t mind. Sev­eral scenes—the famous “naked encounter” with Roo­sevelt is one—didn’t hap­pen that way, but are so seam­lessly inte­grated and well acted as to make them believ­able and accept­able. Churchill’s habits—like the manda­tory siesta which enabled him to work into the wee hours—are deftly con­veyed in a line of dia­logue. There is no bend­ing of his­tory for the sake of drama. Only the advanced pedant can object to the film’s artis­tic license.

Yalta, 1945: Glee­son, Car­iou, Patrenko (HBO).

Janet McTeer is no Vanessa Red­grave, the arche­typal Clemen­tine in “The Gath­er­ing Storm.” She doesn’t even look like Clem­mie, falling short of the char­ac­ter described by her daugh­ter Mary’s biog­ra­phy. Though she gives WSC good advice, she seems more of a neu­rotic scold than a pil­lar of strength. It doesn’t mat­ter because Glee­son, “throws him­self into the char­ac­ter and com­pletely owns him,” as Daniel Carl­son writes, “from the non­stop cig­ars to the famous cadence of his speeches. Glee­son is believ­ably tough but doesn’t make Churchill a war­mon­ger or bully; if any­thing, he’s bur­dened by the thought of the boys he has sent to die.”

Carl­son has his fin­ger on the out­stand­ing qual­ity of this film: its sen­si­tiv­ity to Churchill’s true per­sona. Despite many oppor­tu­ni­ties for igno­rant polit­i­cal posturing—the lev­el­ing of Ger­man cities, for example—Scott and White­more always have Churchill say­ing what he truly believed—culled in this case from My Early Life (1930): “War, which used to be cruel and mag­nif­i­cent, has now become cruel and squalid.”

”Into the Storm” packs less depth than “The Gath­er­ing Storm”—like the per­se­cu­tion of Ralph Wigram for send­ing WSC secret reports on Ger­man rear­ma­ment, and the brav­ery of his wife Ava dur­ing threats against their fam­ily. But too much is going on for side­bars. This is World War II, remem­ber: the French deba­cle, Dunkirk, the Bat­tle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Har­bor, Sin­ga­pore, the fraught meet­ings with Roo­sevelt (Len Car­iou) and Stalin (Alexy Patrenko), the all-or-nothing assault on Nor­mandy. Lead­er­ship is the plot, sub-plot and side­bar.

Some Churchillians have asked why Rid­ley Scott couldn’t have stopped at Pearl Har­bor, and done a third film later; why there couldn’t be mul­ti­ple parts; why it wasn’t a Churchill ver­sion of “Lord of the Rings.” Indeed, I crit­i­cized “The Gath­er­ing Storm” for skip­ping over Neville Cham­ber­lain and Munich. But the best edi­tor I ever worked for said: “A bore is some­one who tells every­thing.” And we are not film­mak­ers. We have no idea what con­straints the pro­duc­ers labored under. We do know that Rid­ley Scott had ninety min­utes. And what he does to por­tray the real Win­ston Churchill is a work of genius. 

My endur­ing impres­sion of “Into the Storm” is of an old man, real­iz­ing after the most heroic chap­ter in his country’s his­tory that his­tory itself has passed him by, the Britain he loved van­ished before his eyes. “The palmy days of Queen Vic­to­ria and a set­tled world order,” as Churchill put it in 1947, are gone for­ever. The war is won, the coun­try lost in a Social­ist dream. Hardly, alas, unfa­mil­iar: a sig­nal mes­sage in 2009.

A lot of us who grew up in Churchill’s time feel the way Churchill does at the end of this film, as he reads a sym­pa­thetic post-election note from his old friend Jack Seely: “I feel our world slip­ping away.” Churchill thinks back: “I met him in South Africa, rid­ing across the veldt. He was Col. Seely then. I saw him at the head of a col­umn of British cav­alry, rid­ing twenty yards in front, on a black horse. I thought of him as the very sym­bol of Impe­r­ial power.”

Watch­ing this film, I had the odd sen­sa­tion that it was well Britain chose World War II for what John Charm­ley called “The End of Glory.” British power and faith, focused one last time by a leader steeped in his­tory and lan­guage, held the fort “till those who hith­erto had been half blind were half ready.” Bet­ter to go out in a flash of light than face the long decline that seems now to attend another super­power. “The proud Amer­i­can will go down into his slav­ery with­out a fight,” Pravda (aston­ish­ingly) declared, “beat­ing his chest and pro­claim­ing to the world how free he really is.” That will take years. For Britain the End of Glory came in months.

“Yes, I’ve worked very hard and achieved a great deal,” Churchill reflected at the end of his long life, “only to achieve noth­ing in the end.” A life that rose to the heights of fame, the hon­ors of the world show­ered upon him—for what? “I feel,” he said, “like an aero­plane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol run­ning out, in search of a safe landing.”

Not only he.

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Tagged as: 1945 British election, Alanbrooke, BBC, Brendan Gleeson, Clementine Churchill, HBO, Hugh Whitemore, Into the Storm, Jack Seely, Janet McTeer, John Charmley, Lord Moran, Potsdam Conference, Pravda, Ridley Scott, Vanessa Redgrave