Over 80 years after D-Day, the Allied landing in Normandy remains the largest seaborne invasion in history. Pressure wants you to know that there’s more to this turning point in World War II than meets the eye. More specifically, the way Anthony Maras’s film sees it, behind every grand military achievement lies routine workplace drama.
Pressure’s gambit is to treat the behind-the-scenes planning of D-Day not only as equally important to the attack but also just as interesting. The biggest decision in the film comes not from whether to invade but when, specifically factoring in how weather conditions would influence the ability of ships to approach the French coastline. This small, underappreciated component of war planning makes meteorologist Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) as pivotal to turning the war’s tide as Allied General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser).
But Scott’s wonky weatherman hardly receives a hero’s welcome when Fraser’s supreme commander summons him away from his highly pregnant wife (Tamsin Topolski) to join the Allied Headquarters at Southwick House. Stagg joins a brain trust that resembles Lincoln’s “team of rivals” model, which Eisenhower convenes to consider all angles of an attack. Yet he’s hardly treated like an equal among a group whose conventional wisdom has begun to calcify into stagnation, most notably around the date of D-Day’s launch: June 5.
Hinging the concept of Pressure around aligning calendars places a ceiling on the suspense the film can generate. Maras and co-writer David Haig, the author of the stage play on which the film is based, must recreate the pleasures of a ticking time-bomb thriller for an audience that knows exactly when the detonation will occur. The onus thus lies with Scott’s performance to make how the explosion happens as interesting as when it does. As the irascible but innovative Stagg, the actor skillfully generates sparks through his character’s internecine skirmishes.
When this newcomer drops into the planning deliberations on the precipice of the invasion, he encounters a team whose remove from the frontlines of devastation has dulled their sense of urgency. Eisenhower’s most trusted consultant in meteorology, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina), is content to model the landing date off historical precedent and general vibes. For an empiricist like Stagg, who insists on incorporating real-time data signals to model weather systems in the volatile skies of Northern Europe, business as usual won’t do.
What follows amounts to something like the Moneyball of war movies, with a disruptive force seeking to modernize operations running into consistent confrontation with a rigid old guard that rests on its laurels. To convince Eisenhower to rethink D-Day’s mission strategy, Stagg must contend with Krick’s bravado—conveyed by Messina in a hammily scene-stealing turn—and Field Marshal Bernard “Monty” Montgomery’s (Damian Lewis) intense brooding. A little help from the one woman with any substantial speaking role at the base, Lt. Kay Sommersby (Kerry Condon), also goes a long way in his coalition-building effort.
Pressure functions best when Maras reflects his protagonist’s nature: straightforward, unflashy, and mission-driven. The film, unfortunately, betrays the nature of Stagg’s triumph in its closing stretch by recreating the D-Day invasion. Granted, most sequences of filmed combat in war movies since Saving Private Ryan have been unable to capture the visceral intensity of how Steven Spielberg depicted the storming of Omaha Beach, but Pressure especially suffers from doing so, as evidenced by one particular sequence marred by unimaginative aesthetics.
Ending in the register of a standard-issue, guns-blazing war movie undercuts the film’s biggest selling point: its ability to grasp both the mythological and mundane elements present in each scene. With plenty of help from Volker Bertelmann’s dramatic score bellowing throughout, the weight of World War II and the tragic consequences of blowing this invasion are never out of mind. Yet Stagg’s dilemma is one all too familiar to knowledge workers, albeit in far lower-stakes scenarios, as they scramble to put together an impossible deliverable for a demanding boss while uncooperative colleagues decry any deviation from orthodoxy.
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