The leader, not the dog

Written by Andrew Chadwick Monday, 23 November 2009 08:34

Earlier this year, Margaret, like pretty much every other BBC political drama ever made, was full of plummy accents and grandly framed shots of Whitehall corridors. It was all terribly British, and Into The Storm is much the same in a superficial sense, but it portrays its protagonist in marginally more sympathetic terms. We don’t learn much here that we didn’t already know, but this is an entertaining and superbly-played drama with an outstanding performance from Brendan Gleeson, who gets Churchill’s iconic voice just right. Switching between 1940 onwards and the 1945 general election, we see Churchill in his prime as a wartime leader, and as the outgoing prime minister and broken man after the war, whose penchant for a fight is no longer needed by a public eager to leave behind the war years.

One thing is made clear: Winston loved war. At one point, after hearing of the bombing of Dresden, he says to his cabinet that before this, war was ‘cruel and magnificent, now it is cruel and squalid.’ It doesn’t occur to him that the latter was the case all along, and later, after winning the war and losing the election he admits that he’d do 1940 all over again. War’s what made him tick, which is a pretty scary thought, and without a fight to lead the country through, he really wasn’t much use to anyone. He is contemptuous of anything progressive, as we see when he growls at Clemmie ‘you’re in one of your left-wing moods,’ and bluntly dismisses the prospect of a welfare state.

The film doesn’t shy away from showing weakness, and the scenes leading up to the election show the prime minister as nervous and moody, shouting at his wife and staff and generally falling apart. We also see Churchill’s unequal relationship with Roosevelt when the president says to one of his staff ‘I like him, but not as much, I think, as he likes me.’ As much as he was powerful and charismatic, the British prime minister was still in thrall to the sheer might of the US and its leader.

Elsewhere, there are some obligatory shots of Spitfires taking off as the prime minister watches proudly, a scene where Churchill accidentally drops his towel in front of Roosevelt, an exchange with a brilliantly stereotypical typical army officer about the uselessness of static guns on the coastline, and several meetings with the king, who talks like a posher Jonathan Ross.

It’s a good job he was voted out when he was, but it’s also probably a very good thing he was in power when he was. His other political views may have been inexcusable, but this film posits that nobody was as well suited to leading the country in a conflict as this man. Into The Storm does a good job of showing Churchill as the right man, at the right time.

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