Their Finest (2017)

Their Finest (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.2/10 (as on 25.04.2017)

R | 1h 57min | Comedy, Drama, Romance

A former secretary, newly appointed as a scriptwriter for propaganda films, joins the cast and crew of a major production while the Blitz rages around them.

Director: Lone Scherfig

Writers: Gaby Chiappe (screenplay), Lissa Evans (based on the novel "Their Finest Hour and a Half" by)

Stars: Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy

IMDB Link Here

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

Handsome, morale-boosting wartime entertainment

Robbie Collin

It’s fitting that Lone Scherfig’s new film – a peek backstage at the Ministry of Information during the Second World War – should have all the qualities of a well-turned piece of propaganda. It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

Sparklingly adapted by Gaby Chiappe from a 2009 novel by Lissa Evans, Their Finest picks up mid-Blitz, with British morale at a barrel-scraping ebb. The government finds itself struggling to strike the right tone in its public information shorts, so the head of the Ministry’s film division (Richard E Grant) hires a young female copywriter called Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) to bring a much-needed feminine perspective to their scripts.

Other films have trained us to expect spiky comebacks to this stuff, whether historically likely or not. But Their Finest smartly withholds that easy jab of satisfaction – and the film’s gender politics are all the more riveting because they’re left to squirm away unhindered in the subtext.

Besides, there’s a job to be done. Catrin is tasked with writing a film about the Dunkirk evacuation that will rally the public’s spirits, while also helping persuade the United States to join the fight beside their allies. It’s a difficult, thankless process that has less to do with creating great art than keeping the production wobbling along by any means necessary.

The struggle to get the movie made becomes a playful critique of the film industry at large, both then and now – not just its treatment of women, though there’s much pointed material on that topic, but also the endless rondo of compromises, fudges and patch-ups that seem required in order to get anything done.

Much of it is just Nighy doing Nighy – delivering a funny line, then putting topspin on it with a frown or a squint – but space is carved out for pathos too, and an after-hours scene in which he sings Wild Mountain Thyme to his cast-mates is touchingly and unexpectedly underplayed.

As for the film-within-a-film, it’s not so much a recreation of wartime melodrama as a broad and rosy spoof of it – yet you may find yourself sniffling along nevertheless, because it’s touchingly clear just how much it means to the people who made it. Hard work, as they say, is its own reward – and in this case makes a thoroughly rewarding film.

 Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

Sharp wartime romance

Wendy Ide

London, 1940. Catrin (Gemma Arterton) is scurrying home through the blitzed streets at dusk. Without warning, she is sideswiped by a bomb blast. Blinking grit from her eyes, she stumbles into a pile of broken bodies. Her initial horror tips into laughter when she realises that they are shop mannequins. Then she notices that one of them is bleeding – a salesgirl lies amid the wreckage of the window display. While the dust and death is still clearing from the air, Catrin vomits from shock, silhouetted in a yawning archway.

The scene elegantly combines twin themes in this bracing Second World War romance from Lone Scherfig. It captures the savage uncertainty of life during wartime; and, in a nod to the film’s movie industry backdrop, it deftly peels back layers of reality and artifice.

This film, adapted from Lissa Evans’s novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, is a pleasing fit for the peppy, playful approach of An Education director Scherfig. And like An Education, Their Finest combines storytelling as enveloping as an eiderdown with sudden prickly burrs of discomfort.

Arterton brings a grace and dignity to the role, which suggests reserves of courage in her character that the screenplay only hints at. Catrin left her home in the Welsh valleys for love. Her artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston) specialises in self-important daubs depicting industrial blight. His canvases are a tough sell. Which is why, when – for reasons that could have been more persuasively developed – Catrin is offered a job at the Ministry of Information’s film division, she jumps at the chance.

The film-within-a-film structure is a neat device, which mirrors the tea-swilling stoicism of the blitz spirit in the brisk pulled-together professionalism of the movie set. It takes in the quiet revolution in wartime sexual politics – the key female characters are in their jobs because the chaps are otherwise engaged, but for the most part, the women have no intention of going “back into their boxes” once the war is over. It also acknowledges the dismissive, tweedy sexism of the era by having even the most sympathetic of the male characters, sarcastic bespectacled screenwriter Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), blithely dismiss women’s dialogue in a movie as “slop”.

The humour is fortified by sterling work from Bill Nighy, deliciously vain as ageing star Ambrose Hilliard and gloriously hammy in character as boozy Uncle Frank. A handsome wintry palette of slate blue, charcoal grey and cream incorporates everything from Ambrose’s dapper wardrobe to Ellis’s glum paintings. Effective use of CGI carves a battle-scarred London backdrop. But even as it affectionately embraces the film-making cliches of the time, the picture falls victim to a few of its own. An awkwardly contrived second-act argument played out under a “bomber’s moon” on a beach uses up the film’s entire cheese ration in one go. Were it not for the unexpected turn of events shortly afterwards, the script could have torpedoed itself with predictability. Still, of the many second world war films poised for release this year – among them Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk; Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour and Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill – it’s hard to imagine any will match Their Finest for its big-hearted swell of warmth and its unstuffy empathy.

 Read Full review at Guardian

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟  

Bill Nighy, Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin lead the way in a wartime tale that hits you right in the heart  

MATTHEW BOND

There are some films that hit you right in the heart. Their Finest is one of them. I’ve seen it twice now and absolutely loved it on both occasions.

It’s made me laugh, it’s made me cry and it’s made me realise what a fine actor Sam Claflin is quietly becoming.

But before I urge you all to rush out and see it, I have to warn you that my response to the film is as much personal as it is professional.

As the son of a mother who, between her first career as an actress and her third act as a television producer, was for many years a script editor, I warm to any film that combines that Proustian whiff of late-night whisky with the clackety-clack of a typewriter.

And I particularly warm to one that combines both with a female scriptwriter making her way in what was then – just as it was for my mother – very much a man’s world.

The story – based on a novel by Lissa Evans – is now properly up and running, as Catrin soon proves a resourceful dab hand at scripting propaganda films.

 ‘Authenticity and optimism’ are the key words, and the story of two sisters who borrow their father’s fishing boat to bring back soldiers from Dunkirk seems to provide both.

There’s just one problem, as Catrin soon discovers. The sisters’ story isn’t quite true. But when did truth get in the way of good, morale-boosting propaganda?

Their Finest is directed by Lone Scherfig, who may be Danish-born but now seems completely at home in the British cinematic tradition. Their Finest is her best since An Education, the film that catapulted her into mainstream acclaim in 2009.

The performances she draws from her cast are just exquisite. Claflin, still only 30, quietly dominates every scene he is in, while Arterton is as good here as she has ever been. Better, even.

Helen McCrory is a radiant delight as the sad but surprisingly worldly spinster sister who steps into the breach when her agent brother is killed.

Rachael Stirling is a study in purpose and power as the quietly closeted but ever-so-nosey lesbian Ministry administrator.

As for Jeremy Irons as a stage-struck Cabinet Minister unshakeably convinced of his own theatrical genius, his brief but glorious cameo is one of the highlights of the film.

But rising above them all is Bill Nighy, simply perfect as the ageing, vain and immaculately dressed actor Ambrose Hilliard, who still thinks he should be up for the romantic lead but is persuaded to take on a lesser role.

The tone is spot-on throughout. In other hands, this could easily have been a lightweight Ealing-style romantic comedy but, despite superficial resemblances, it never is.

This is a wartime story where characters actually die, rather shockingly – and perhaps audience-dividingly – in at least one case.

With casting and production design also both dazzlingly good, Their Finest is a period delight that I’m sure many will love. But nobody, I suspect, more than me.

 It’s hard to over-estimate just how perilous Britain’s situation was in the late summer of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force had just been rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, RAF pilots were mounting a desperate air defence, the Blitz was beginning and the country faced invasion.

Catrin also stands for the many thousands of women whose lives were changed utterly by the Blitz. ‘She represents what ordinary people achieved in extraordinary circumstances,’ says Lissa Evans, who wrote the novel on which the film is based.

Morgan was a screenwriter on Went The Day Well?, based on a Graham Greene story, in which a rural English village sees off a German invasion.

Like the best war films of the period, it’s not about overblown heroics but the quiet conviction that our values would see us through. ‘Films like Went The Day Well? and Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve aren’t trying to say everything is all right, because manifestly it wasn’t,’ says Chiappe. ‘But they offered a sense of Britishness that was worth fighting for.’

For Arterton, film can exert the same power it did during the war. ‘It’s escapism. It takes you away for an hour and a half, from whatever is going on in your life. It’s so important, and as technology gets more advanced, I still hope people will always go to the cinema.’

Read full review at Daily Mail

Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin play reluctant screenwriting collaborators on a WWII film designed to lift the British public's spirits and coax America into the conflict in Lone Scherfig's period comedy-drama.

David Rooney

As proto-feminist protagonists go, Catrin Cole (Arterton) may be a little meek for modern tastes. But her quiet assertiveness seems truer to the period than it would have had she been given a contemporary spin and a lot of boldly declarative speeches. It also allows Arteron to explore the inner strength and resolve of this warm-hearted woman via subtle strokes that yield affecting rewards.

The performance acquires heft also from its position at the center of a sterling ensemble of British talent, from rising stars like Sam Claflin to veterans like Bill Nighy, Helen McCrory, Richard E. Grant and Jeremy Irons, the latter in a very funny self-satirizing cameo. Their Finest doesn't match the delicacy of Danish director Scherfig's best English-language feature, An Education

Adapted by Gaby Chiappe from a 2009 novel by Lissa Evans, the story is written with a light touch but also a keen sense of the mood of domestic Britain in those darkest hours of 1940, when London was riddled with bombsites. That reality is reflected in the gloomy paintings of Ellis (Jack Huston), whose work is deemed too brutal and depressing for use by the War Office. Needing income, his Welsh transplant wife Catrin applies to the Ministry of Information for what she thinks is a secretarial position. But the head of the Film Division (Richard E. Grant) says her copywriting skills make her ideal to bring the women's perspective to pictures whose mandate is "authenticity with optimism."

That feminist angle remains quite subdued. The real interest is in watching as the film comes together — in the screenwriters' office, on location in Devon and later in the studio — as Catrin maneuvers to stop Rose and Lily from being sidelined by male heroics. She proves a canny negotiator also with haughty thespian Ambrose Hilliard (Nighy), the popular star of a pre-war detective series now reduced to playing a supporting role he feels is beneath him. The sheer indignation on Nighy's face as he reads the description of his character in the movie ("a shipwreck of a man; 60s, looks older") is priceless.

Nighy's wryly self-mocking performance puts the exploration of Ambrose's vanity, his shaky pride and his awareness that his romantic-lead days are behind him among the movie's most enjoyable elements. He takes career advice with weary forbearance from his Polish agent and longtime friend Sammy Smith (Eddie Marsan). But when Sammy is killed during an air raid and his sister Sophie (McCrory) takes over managing his clients, her crisp authority and wily guidance introduce a lively spark into their scenes, with Ambrose's flirtatious manner adding some minor-key sexual frisson.

One of the film's funniest stretches springs from government instructions — issued by Irons' Secretary of War with the hilarious pomposity of a theatrical ham languishing in a bureaucrat's job — that a brave American must be incorporated into the story to encourage the U.S. to get on board as allies. The wholesome blond Air Force hero hired to fill that spot, Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacy), is a lump of wood on-camera, but Catrin persuades Ambrose to add acting coach to his responsibilities.

Arterton brings grace and understatement to Catrin's gradual belief in herself and in the magic of movies, while Claflin reveals maturity and dry humor that will be a surprise for audiences who know him primarily from his Hunger Games role or the weepy Me Before You.

While the strong ensemble cast is Their Finest's most valuable asset, the movie also looks quite handsome on what appears to be a modest budget, and includes some delightful glimpses of how screen effects were achieved way back in those handcrafted days. A reveal of the visual trick behind a Dunkirk scene lands a huge laugh. Rachel Portman's score isn't shy about pushing the sentiment, but that's in keeping with a film that celebrates old-fashioned screen storytelling with infectious fondness.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆

   

Gemma Arterton is the focus and soul of Their Finest which is something more than a wartime drama

JAMIE EAST

‘Their Finest’ is the story of those filmmakers, their lives and their battles against bureaucracy, sexism and, well… a nation at war – so death, bombs and all that.

The production of a film about twin sisters who set out to sea in their dad’s boat to rescue soldiers in Dunkirk is embarked upon, and it is where the actual film takes off – comedy and whimsy intentionally never quite hiding the real horror and loss surrounding them all.

Bill Nighy, Richard E Grant, Eddie Marsan and Rachel Stirling are all dependable and welcome faces, but Gemma Arterton is the focus and the soul here; and she’s really quite terrific.

This is something more than a wartime romance drama. It is compassionate and draws you completely in.

Read full review at The Sun

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

Lone Scherfig's Blitz-era drama is entertaining and insightful

Geoffrey Macnab

Lone Scherfig’s entertaining and insightful romantic drama, Their Finest, is set during the Blitz in 1940. This was the beginning of one of the richest and most contradictory periods in British film history.

In 1939, it had looked as if British filmmaking was going to grind to a halt and that cinemas would be closed down for the duration. Even when they re-opened, production levels plummeted. Nonetheless, against the odds and as the bombs fell on London, the war years turned out to be an extraordinarily fertile period – a mini golden era in which old attitudes about gender and class were turned on their head. The Government may have been using filmmaking for propaganda purposes but exceptional work was done all the same. Audiences clamoured for new movies that reflected the realities of their wartimes lives rather than for star-filled Hollywood fantasies.

Adapted from the Lissa Evans novel Their Finest Hour And A Half, this is a self-reflexive affair – a film about filmmaking. Catrin is assigned to research an uplifting story that her bosses in the Ministry of Information think will appeal on the home front, to women in particular. The story in question is about two sisters who defied their drunken sea captain father, borrowed his boat and headed to Dunkirk to help in the evacuation of the stranded allied forces.

In reality, the boat had engine trouble and didn’t make it to Dunkirk. The reports in the local papers about the sisters’ heroism were wildly exaggerated. Nonetheless, once the story is given the Technicolor treatment and is written up by Catrin and her colleagues, it becomes rousing fare for cinema goers.

 One of the pleasures of the film is the way it both gently mocks and celebrates the British in wartime. At times, the Brits can seem very absurd indeed. Among the main characters here is the ageing actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), a narcissistic old-timer who was once a matinee idol. Nighy plays him in wonderfully haughty and conceited fashion.

Ambrose is in his 60s and simply can’t accept that he is no longer top of the bill – or that all the best Italian waiters at his favourite Soho restaurants have been interned as enemy aliens. He treats his loyal agent Sammy (Eddie Marsan) in high-handed fashion and is contemptuous of the idea that he be asked to play an old “shipwreck of a man” in a wartime potboiler. It is typical of the film that someone who seems early on like a comic buffoon is given depth and pathos.

Their Finest often resembles the films it is so busy sending up. Early on, for example, the relationship between Catrin and her fellow screenwriter Buckley (Sam Claflin) is dealt with in such reticent and evasive fashion that it makes Ealing movies of the 1940s look melodramatic and expressive by comparison. The two writers are clearly attracted to one another but that doesn’t stop Buckley from lecturing and browbeating Catrin and continually telling her to be more economical with her dialogue. He’s offhand and cynical.

There is plenty of death and destruction in the film: horribly bloodied bodies that need to be identified in the morgue or victims of the Blitz lying in the rubble of what was once their homes. Amid all the carnage, no-one betrays any outward sense of grief. They simply get on with the job in hand in a typically British fashion.

If Nighy is the most shameless in his scene-stealing antics, several other character actors here are also trying to pilfer our attention. Richard E. Grant rolls his eyes and furrows his brow in fine comic fashion as the head of the film division at the Ministry of Information. Rachael Stirling plays her character (a caustic lesbian film executive from the Ministry of Information) with a Tallulah Bankhead-like world weariness.

Jeremy Irons appears briefly, reciting soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Henry V, and there’s an engaging cameo from Jake Lacy as a good-looking but dim-witted American pilot drafted in to star in the movie to please the US distributors. Some of the in-jokes begin to grate but the film has enough heart never simply to seem like a lampoon of wartime British cinema. Its recreation of Dunkirk using painted backdrops is ingenious. It will be intriguing to see how Christopher Nolan treats the same subject matter in his IMAX epic, due out later in the year.

 Read full review at Independent

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟✬☆  

Bill Nighy scores the best bits of this Blitz pic

Jake Wilson

Nostalgia for the Blitz has become one of Britain's most marketable commodities, especially now collective memory of the reality is starting to vanish.

Early in Lone Scherfig's​ Their Finest, I had the awful feeling that the heroine Catrin (Gemma Arterton), who works at the Ministry of Information, would wind up coining the phrase "Keep calm and carry on".

Thankfully, this does not occur. The story follows the making of a film within the film – an (imaginary) wartime propaganda piece inspired by a heroic rescue undertaken by two sisters during the Dunkirk evacuation.

Catrin, a talented writer, is drafted to help out with dialogue for women – or "slop", as her collaborators call it, flaunting the kind of misogyny that's joking only to a point.

These collaborators include the outwardly no-nonsense Tom Buckley, played by Sam Claflin, who with period spectacles, pencil moustache and Brylcreemed hair is less openly smouldering but much more winning than he was as the suave quadriplegic in Me Before You.

Inevitably, a romantic triangle takes shape, the third corner being a self-absorbed left-wing artist played by Jack Huston – who gives the impression of rehearsing to play the dying George Orwell, and might do so quite successfully when his face has a few more lines.

Adapted by screenwriter Gaby Chiappe​ from a novel by Lissa Evans, Their Finest is crowded with characters and character actors: Richard E. Grant as the stuffy head of the film division, Bill Nighy as a hasbeen matinee idol, Eddie Marsan​ as Nighy's agent, and so on.

There are times when the canvas seems overcrowded, but nearly everyone gets the chance to be both touching and funny. Inevitably, the best moments belong to Nighy, a happily shameless show-off who revels in his tailor-made part.

Their Finest is hokum, but it's honest hokum – which, like John Lee Hancock's underrated Saving Mr Banks, incorporates a defence of the simplifying, unifying value of popular entertainment.

In its modest, largely comic way, it paints an unusually convincing picture of how films are shaped by factors beyond the control of any one individual: the conventions of storytelling at a given place and time, the whims of a producer or director, the need to beef up the part of one actor or hide the weakness of another.

That said, the author of Their Finest itself is undoubtedly Scherfig, a Danish director who has now made several films in Britain – and who captures the spirit of the era rather more convincingly than Robert Zemeckis​ managed recently in his glossy thriller Allied.

True to the British convention of the stiff upper lip, Scherfig maintains a certain restraint in the tear-jerking scenes. Similarly, she portrays Catrin as a feminist by the period's standards without turning her into a 21st-century woman in disguise.

The Technicolor of the 1940s is convincingly simulated, and while there may not be the budget for panoramas of a bombed-out London, Sebastian Blenkov'​s often beautiful cinematography catches the foreboding feel of an English winter where light starts to fade in the middle of the afternoon.

Read full review at Sydney Morning herald