Reviews

If you took all the scenes in this movie, tossed them in the air and reassembled them in whatever order they came to hand -- and you did this fifty times -- you'd have the same movie every time. It consists of a bunch of Robert Redford winks and nods juxtaposed with a recurring clip of a guy in a fedora walking into a bank. That's the way it starts, and that's the way it ends, the only variation being an occasional glimpse of two old folks having a cup of coffee in a diner. The movie advertises the great Tom Waits as a member of the cast, but gives Mr. Waits a bare three-minute dialogue (the movie's highlight), seeing no reason to let him sing a song or even to include a Tom Waits song in its score. Too bad, because this is a film that could have used a soulful, raspy voice in the background, there being so little of interest happening in the foreground.

Here we have a WWII film that asks such interesting questions as: what if Winston Churchill had been a doddering senile drunk instead of one of the greatest wartime leaders in history? Or what if he had seen the D-Day landing as a certain disaster and opposed it at every turn instead of being one of its prime architects? Or what if he hadn't been the world-renowned symbol of British resolve but instead the sad-sack butt of insults and insubordination from his generals, his aides, his wife, and even his secretary? These are the questions posed by "Churchill", the film -- and it answers them with all the finesse and subtlety you'd expect from the starved imagination that would ask them. It is proof that you are never too long-gone to be gratuitously slandered.

The problem with all the right-wing bashing of this film is that it might lead progressives to think it is worth seeing. It is not, although John Lithgow's delicious impersonation of a real-estate tycoon is compensation of sorts. Selma Hayek, as Beatriz, comes across as merely crazy, and she is the subject of some the most unflattering camera angles recently seen in film. Whatever the film's intended message, it is sacrificed to its improbable ending, which is inconsistent with everything we've been led to believe about the heroine. For the rest, which is to say, everything that goes on at the dinner party, it is an exercise in vicarious squirming, the viewer in continual embarrassment on behalf of everybody.

This is a film so bad that you can imagine it one day having a large cult following. It proceeds from one improbability to another with an almost charming nonchalance, as if to say,"Oh, never mind, you know what we mean." It is so filled with non-sequiturs that the occasional sequitur seems wandering and lost. The upshot of this is that the film keeps you so befuddled that you find yourself sticking around to see if it will finally unravel itself. It doesn't. It just smiles at the end and says, "So there you have it."

It is hard to imagine the director's excuse, given that he had the model of the successful 1945 film in front of him. Actually the film lists seven directors. It is hard to decide whether this was six too many or seven too many.