Operation Overlord, the code name for the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, has long been an Anglo-American film event of epic proportions, from the 1962 CinemaScope extravaganza The Longest Day to Steven Spielberg's 1998 Saving Private Ryan. The new movie Pressure, Anthony Maras' screen adaptation of David Haig's acclaimed 2014 play, comes to the big screen in time for the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, carving out a place in the pantheon of films about the World War II liberation of Western Europe away from the action on the beaches.
The film is a closely wound chamber drama charting stormy weather both meteorological and emotional, of the film's main protagonists. The Irish actor Andrew Scott deftly embodies James Stagg, the punctilious Scottish chief meteorologist. Stagg works opposite his military superior General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, played by a bullish and baronial Brendan Fraser somewhat at a remove from the pinched steely-eyed Ike seen on the newsreels of the time.
Maras' film places these protagonists squarely at odds as they are introduced to one another a mere 72 hours from a proposed landing on the beaches of Normandy. Eisenhower's own weatherman, Irving Krick, played at an unnerving extroverted pitch by Chris Messina, is dead sure that the weather will be fine. The academic Stagg is altogether more dour and skeptical, sensing a storm brewing for the planned date of the invasion. Where Krick is busy grandstanding, the darling of his men and superiors, the ever unpopular Stagg urges caution. He wants more data, more detail and more observation of the forces that turn the winds and drive the storms on the distant seas.
The tension between the two boils over into a confrontation which only Eisenhower can adjudicate, a task complicated by his own arrogant British subordinate, a wiry and dislikable General Bernard Montgomery — played with a villainous verve bordering on the pantomime by Damian Lewis.
The film manages a frenetic pace within closed rooms to match the tension of a battlefield. The pressures and the politics are inescapable. But Pressure is less a war story, rapt with the hysteria of battlefield deeds, than an intense exposition on the human capacity to tolerate uncertainty at a time when decisiveness is an imperative for action.
The airy confines of the stately home where Allied commanders are gathered provide both the grandeur and the contrast to the minutiae inked out on vast maps in the small hours of the night. Maras is able to make the bucolic well-appointed rooms seethe with frustration. The weathermen are in a black box, fed data as it arrives from distant weather balloons from Newfoundland to the African coast. Using these juxtapositions to full effect, the film builds a picture of simultaneous fragility and enormity to match the colossal task of judging the right conditions to commit to the largest sea invasion in recorded history.
The four-handed conflicts between the weathermen and the generals, however, seem a little too contrived at times. The presence of Eisenhower's secretary Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon) is used as a dramatic foil a little too often, notably as a means to salve seemingly irreconcilable clashes between the personalities of her impatient and demonstrative boss and Stagg's soft-spoken yet obstinate martinet. Her character deserved more depth than a short backstory in a monologue.
When Krick and Stagg enter the command boardroom to present their opposing cases mere hours before a decision must be made, the film slips into a type of courtroom drama of stormy exchanges from the benches, with both Stagg and Krick pulling out all the stops to get their forecasts approved.
Yet, as a matter of historical record, it must be said the film makes no mention of Sverre Petterssen, the Norwegian meteorologist who accurately predicted the storms that delayed the mission and pointed out the 36-hour lull between them which cleared the way for the subsequent go-ahead for attacks. His name is perhaps an omission for the sake of dramatic license, but a glaring one at that.
The famous and fateful decision to postpone the invasion opens what is perhaps the more dramatically interesting phase of the film. The storm Stagg predicted arrives with full force and hammers the vast windows, and Krick, a broken man, must come to terms with his hubris and concede his error so he and Stagg can work urgently on setting the next available window for D-Day. Pressure succeeds most when it explores the themes of ego and anxiety in the face of mortal decisions about the lives of others and becomes a drama about this staggering weight of responsibility.
When Pressure finally offers glimpses of the horrors of the Normandy landings, they serve as a visual contrast to the switchboard staff and generals waiting in a cramped radio room, listening to panicked audio from the beaches through headphones pressed against their ears. All ranks are reduced to helpless witnesses, anxiously standing in the eye of a man-made storm that must now run its course.
Perhaps it is these psychological battles that need retelling and make Maras' film all the more prescient. Pressure is about a war of uncertainty and of faith. For all the prior cinematic depictions of storming bunkers and camaraderie under fire, Pressure offers us the quiet heroism of rational restraint in the figure of James Stagg, who weathered his inner storms and bore the courage to be disliked.
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