Pressure: Competent Men Get Their Due

The first face that Pressure shows you belongs to a young man who is taking his final breaths in the surf at Slapton Sands. It is April 1944, and on a Devon beach, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff is rehearsing the Normandy landings when a garbled order and a flotilla of German E-boats turn the exercise into a massacre that kills 749 American servicemen. Director Anthony Maras films it fast and lets the silence do the rest, because the catastrophe is his thesis. Not heroism. Mistakes, the kind that command staffs make, and the men whose job is to keep them from happening twice.

What follows is a chamber piece: 72 hours in one map-strewn room at Southwick House, played handsomely by Mentmore Towers. Andrew Scott is phenomenal as Captain James Stagg, the Royal Air Force’s chief forecaster for Operation Overlord, a hard man — brusque, exacting, indifferent to being liked. The film never mistakes that for coldness. What commands the room is sheer competence, the authority of a man who knows exactly what he is looking at when no one else does.

He also has something to lose. Stagg has left his heavily pregnant wife, Liz, in a London under the bombs, and we are not allowed to forget her. A continent, after all, is only ever an abstraction until it is one family, and then another.

Against him stands the charismatic Colonel Irving Krick, played by Chris Messina with a Caltech sparkle that makes the overconfidence almost endearing. Krick is no villain, just a good man who has been right before and trusts his method: analog forecasting, the matching of today’s weather map to its nearest twin in the archive. It has served Eisenhower beautifully in North Africa, but the Channel is not the Sahara, and Stagg suspects that the sky is about to do something the records have never seen. He reads the outliers; Krick rounds them off. Stagg’s is the better science and, though the film is too tactful to say so, the humbler epistemology.

The rest of the room is arranged around Stagg with equal care. Brendan Fraser’s General Eisenhower meets him exactly: a man of genial authority and unwavering self-command, tormented only by the cost of the men he must send into the dark. Late in the film, Fraser does almost nothing for a long beat: he listens, he calculates, and we watch his eyes settle on a single face. Kerry Condon’s Kay Summersby reads his silences and does more with a glance than most actors manage with a soliloquy. The portrait holds up: Mack Teasley, author of The Real Ike, told me that the film gets the man right, from the temper Ike spent a lifetime mastering to the four-pack-a-day habit to the self-assurance of a leader who was, in Mack’s words, “happy in his own skin.”

What saves the film from hero worship is that it never makes Stagg an oracle. Science deals in probabilities. He forecasts storms for days, perhaps weeks, and promises no reprieve; watching the patterns shift, he spots an opening forming and stakes the invasion on it, with the best data a man could have and no more. The film lets the outcome stay uncertain, and that is the surest proof of the humility it is arguing for.

Jamie Ramsay shoots it all in a classical register that most modern war films have forgotten: lamplit rooms, weather maps composed with the patience of a Whistler interior, not a needless close-up in sight. Volker Bertelmann’s score knows when not to insist. The warmth is the discipline, and where a colder film would have gone to technocratic chill, this one breathes.

We scarcely glimpse a Nazi in the film’s 100 minutes, and the absence is part of the argument. With no on-screen enemy to absorb our hatred, we feel the civilizational weight of Eisenhower’s decision, carried by those whom we do see: the boys filing onto the ships, the lives the staff is about to wager on the weather. The Germans are a front somewhere offshore. The moral pressure is in the chamber.

The film belongs to a small, honorable genre: the prudence picture, whose drama is the weighing of evidence by men in rooms. The Hunt for Red October, Thirteen Days, Apollo 13. Such films get filed, perhaps condescendingly, under “dad movies,” a label that Focus Features has cheerfully embraced in selling this one. It takes seriously what fathers do at their best: gather the facts, weigh the consequences, resist the seduction of certainty, and carry the cost of the decision. This is the cinema of office and obligation, and we are badly short of it. We should be grateful when it arrives so well composed.

It arrives, too, in an age that has misplaced its taste for the competent man. We pick our leaders now for charisma, for how they read on a screen, and to prefer one for mere reliability has come to seem quaint. Pressure tugs us back. Its Eisenhower is the unglamorous article, the organizer and the listener, outshone in popular memory by the telegenic man who would succeed him, a verdict that historians have spent decades reversing.

Asked years later by John F. Kennedy what won him D-Day, Eisenhower replied: “We had better meteorologists than the Germans.” Maras has made one of the best films so far this year, and exactly the picture that this dry, unanswerable line deserves. The civilization that produced such men deserves it too.