On June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy launched the brutal series of battles that brought Hitler’s ambitions in Western Europe to a halt. The movie Pressure deals with the 72 hours leading up to the momentous D-Day invasion.
Director Anthony Maras, focuses on a part of the story that sounds prosaic but proves essential to Allied success, an accurate weather forecast.
Pressure delivers a dramatized version of events that unfolded at Allied headquarters in Southwick House, Hampshire, relying on sharpening tensions between a low-key but obstinate Royal Air Force meteorologist (Andrew Scott) and a brash American meteorologist (Chris Messina).
Messina's Irving Krick, who had enormous successes predicting the weather during the North African campaign, relied on analog charts, arguing that the weather would be fine on June 5th, the original D-Day date.
Scott’s James Stagg rejected Krick's approach. He surveyed many locations in the North Atlantic to discover what he considered the requisite conditions for a mission-wrecking storm. Later, Stagg identified a brief window in which the beaches could be stormed.
Following Stagg's advice, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Force, delayed the mission by a day.
Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with David Haig, who also wrote the play on which the movie is based, Maras concentrates mostly on Stagg, an officer whose wife is on the brink of delivering their first child when he's ordered to join Eisenhower's command.
As Eisenhower, Brendan Fraser doesn't exactly become an Ike lookalike, even with make-up that gives him a bald pate. Still, Fraser conveys the pressure Eisenhower felt about obtaining a definitive forecast.
To complicate matters, Eisenhower was being pressured by British Field Marshal Montgomery (Damian Lewis) to proceed as planned, lest the invasion be jeopardized, scuttling chances for an Allied victory.
Pressure takes some liberties with the historical record, as it transforms an abstract theme (differing approaches to weather forecasting) into a high-stakes conflict.
Both Scott (subdued, focused, and intense) and Messina (confident to a fault) do their best to incorporate the essence of opposing personalities, but Pressure can be more informative than exciting, a re-enactment with added dramatic flourishes.
Beyond that, the drama unfolds in programmatic fashion, building toward the expectedly tense encounters between men whose advice will affect the war’s outcome. Well and good, but turning disagreements about the weather into a clash of styles (American vs. British) feels a bit inflated.
A bit of emotional leavening is added by Kerry Condon, whose Kay Summersby functions as an aide and confidant to the troubled Eisenhower; Summersby provides the steadying hand for Ike, who's tormented by the failure of a preparatory operation in which GIs died.
In sum, Pressure benefits from a story that may be unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. It may not be a great wartime drama, but it shows how a decision based on technical expertise can alter the course of history. Think of it as a historical footnote without which the sweeping main drama depicted in many other movies could not have unfolded.
