Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a barking Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie.