It’s all about writing about ‘the slop’
Print Edition
“THEIR Finest” is a movie about making a movie, specifically a glossy propaganda film meant to bolster morale in Britain in the darkest days of World War II.
It is also very much a movie-movie. Good-looking, finely acted, and well-told, director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) has made a charming, witty and romantic gem. It is “Shakespeare in Love” in World War II.
Adapted by Gaby Chiappe from the novel “Their Finest Hour and a Half” by Lissa Evans, “Their Finest” is centered on Catrin Cole (a luminous Gemma Arterton), a copywriter hired by the government to help write the “slop,” or female dialogue, for a film meant to lift the spirits of a war weary citizenry. She’s a sort of proto-Peggy Olson whose talents and thick skin get her a place at the table alongside the men (although she is, they make sure to hammer home, paid less than her male counterparts).
Catrin takes the job out of necessity — her husband Ellis (Jack Huston) is a disabled and temperamental artist whose bleak industrial landscapes aren’t selling and thus not bringing in any money for their rent. Although Ellis tries to talk her out of the work, Catrin comes alive in the writer’s room, sparring with the egotistical lead writer Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) as they try to meld minds to make a compelling story out of a newspaper account of twin sisters who stole their alcoholic father’s boat to rescue soldiers from Dunkirk.
It’s a relentlessly appealing take on the creative process, laced with humor and insight as Tom and Catrin bicker and banter about just who the hero should be (a man or the woman?), and how strictly they should adhere to the facts (not much, and be sure to cut out the boring parts). What ends up being put into production, of course, is worlds away from reality, but there’s a lovely discovery of the truth at the heart of the sisters’ heroics that eventually makes it onto the screen.
Caiappe and Scherfig pack the film with fun side characters and showbiz insider jokes, such as when they go out to the past-his-prime actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy, always the scene stealer) for the “corpse role” of the drunken father who’s described as being a “shipwreck of a man” who is in his 60s but “looks older.”
They’re also, late in the game, instructed that they have to cast an American in the film because, in addition to British propaganda, the government now needs this film to persuade the US to help out war efforts.
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