MAY 15, 2017
It’s called “The Slop.”
That’s not a judgment on Lone Sherfig’s entertaining new movie “Their Finest,” but it is instead a pivotal plot point in her latest film, this one set in London in 1940. With the Yanks not yet engaged in World War II, the British Ministry of Information finds it has to produce short films, designed to run between the two main features in a double bill at the cinema, in order to boost the Brits’ declining morale.
In theater, the shorts prove to be a miserable failure, because, frankly, they stink. Audiences either laugh at them, sleep through them or make out in the balcony. But nobody is leaving the theater inspired, largely due to the laughably stilted dialogue given to the women characters in the shorts — what the Ministry calls “the slop.”
One morning, Caitrin Cole (Gemma Arterton), the Welsh wife of an unsuccessful artist (Jack Huston) goes into an interview with the Ministry of Information office for what she thinks is a secretarial position but finds instead that she is being offered a position writing the slop. Caitrin has no idea what she’s doing but unexpectedly finds that she has a flair for writing dialogue that reflects how women really talk and what their concerns are, as they are left to carry on at home.
Caitrin’s talent sparks the attention of head writer Buckley (Sam Claflin), who asks her to join him in putting together a feature-length inspirational film that could really restore the bureau’s reputation. Caitrin stumbles into the story of two sisters who claim that they stole their father’s boat to help in the evacuation of Dunkirk. The story is pretty much complete hooey, but that means nothing to the Ministry, led by Jeremy Irons’ Secretary of War, who rushes the film into production.
Then Caitrin’s film is really threatened to go off the rails with the addition of…actors — particularly one actor — 60ish Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), a former leading man who cannot come to grips that he is a former leading man. (If “Their Finest” was made 20 years ago, this would be the Peter O’Toole part.) Though Nighy’s antics do take the focus off the seriousness of writer Gaby Chiappe’s theme about the nature of propaganda, “Their Finest” wouldn’t be half as entertaining without them.
Arterton and Claflin carry the bulk of the film of the film’s acting load, and they’re quite strong, particularly Claflin, who gets to show shades within Buckley that he never would have been allowed to explore in his “Hunger Games” movies. And Nighy, who has made an extremely successful 40-year career built on stealing films, pockets “Their Finest” as well.
Still, there is a certain predictability to the film’s plotting that makes “Their Finest” go down easily, like comfort food, that at times disappointed me. I do suspect that there’s a sharper, more political film buried somewhere inside Chiappe’s script, but director Sherfig, who made the wonderfully perceptive “An Education” with Michelle Williams, doesn’t seem interested into going there.
She has settled on making a crowd-pleaser (and there’s nothing wrong with that) when she could have made a sharp satire that may have likely stood the test of time.
GRADE: B
