Pressure
VERDICT: (Four stars out of five) Thunderously good
The story at the heart of this absorbing film is true, or mostly true, but if it weren’t you’d think it had been machine-tooled to appeal to a British audience. After all, it focuses on two of our three great preoccupations: the Second World War and the weather. Only the Royal Family is missing.
Adapted by David Haig from his own stage hit, it stars Andrew Scott as Group Captain James Stagg, the doughty Scottish meteorologist who advises General Dwight D Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) not to launch Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France, on Monday, June 5, 1944.
That is the date Eisenhower has designated as D-Day and even a short postponement could be calamitous. Such a colossal military enterprise cannot possibly be kept secret from the Germans for much longer. But Stagg’s analysis of the available data has convinced him that a major storm, brewing in the Atlantic, is heading for Normandy.
To launch the invasion in such conditions, with waves possibly as high as 15ft, will be even more disastrous than delaying. He suggests waiting until June 18, by which time the weather should be calmer.
At command headquarters in Hampshire, Eisenhower and other top brass are aghast, especially the truculent General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis, pronouncing his Rs as Ws with twemendous gusto), who almost blows a gasket.
A fortnight’s delay is unthinkable. The invasion will fail. ‘Do you want to be personally wesponsible for losing this war, Captain Stagg?’ rages Monty. The question, not that he has any chance of pronouncing it, is rhetorical.
So, the title of the film, and the play before it, is neatly ambiguous. High and low pressure systems are exerting almost intolerable stress on Stagg, compounded by conflicting advice from a meteorologist in the US camp, Colonel Irving Krick (Chris Messina) who, preferring to predict the weather by examining patterns going back as far as 1904, declares confidently that it will be fine on June 5.
Andrew Scott is reliably splendid as the reserved, rather charmless Scottish meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg
Damian Lewis as the truculent General Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery, who ‘pronounces his Rs as Ws with twemendous gusto’
Krick pompously adds that he accompanied Eisenhower through North Africa and got his forecasts right every time. To which a modern-day response might be to invoke Caroline Aherne’s immortal Mediterranean weathergirl in The Fast Show, who – as she slaps fat suns on the map – proclaims: ‘Scorchio! Scorchio! Scorchio!’ Stagg merely notes dryly that Krick was lucky to be operating in such ‘stable’ conditions.
It’s easy to see why all this unfolded so compellingly on the stage. It is inherently theatrical rather than filmic, and, heaven knows, dialogue about millibars and cumulus clouds does not necessarily get the pulse racing.
And yet, even if a sub-plot about Stagg’s lovely wife going into labour at the height of the drama seems a little confected, and even though we all know the outcome of D-Day (which in the event was postponed by just 24 hours after Sir James correctly anticipated a break in the storm), director Anthony Maras makes a thoroughly decent job of turning the story into a bona fide thriller.
It opens arrestingly, too, and very cinematically, with overhead shots of dead and dying American troops, victims of Exercise Tiger, the catastrophic April 1944 rehearsal at Slapton Sands in Devon in which more than 700 men perished.
Six weeks later, Eisenhower is still haunted by the memory. But should that make him more or less reliant on Stagg’s advice? He prepares two statements, one to announce a triumph, the other a disaster.
For real events like this to be stirringly recreated, the acting and writing must be spot-on. They are. Scott is reliably splendid as the reserved, rather charmless Stagg, ably supported by Fraser, Lewis, Messina and Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s confidante Kay Summersby, his Irish personal secretary and, it was strongly rumoured, lover.
Historians are divided on that. What is not in doubt, incidentally, is Eisenhower’s height, and Stagg’s. In the film the general towers over the captain. In reality it was the other way round. Stagg’s older son Peter, born in 1941, inherited from his father what in the circumstances we might call his altitude. At a mighty 6ft 10in, he played rugby union for Scotland and the British Lions. What a family. What a tale.
Pressure opens in cinemas tomorrow

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