It’s the London Blitz. A timid but tenacious Welsh woman named Catrin (Gemma Arterton) decides to look for work in the city to support both herself and her husband, a struggling painter with an old war injury that keeps him from fighting. Soon after the Ministry of Information’s film division offers her a job writing “slop” (the department’s charming term for women’s dialogue), Catrin is asked to research a story in the newspaper about identical twin sisters who bravely sailed their father’s boat to Dunkirk and saved the lives of several English soldiers. But the reporters, as Catrin soon discovers, got the facts wrong. The twins didn’t make it to Dunkirk at all (their engine broke halfway there), and they weren’t in their early 20s (they were about 30). Fortunately the department decides to make the film anyway, as the story—fact or fiction—will likely make a smashing piece of war propaganda. Even without Christopher Nolan or 21st century special effects.
From here, this becomes one of those movies about the movies, finding conflict and humor in the fraught relationships between writers and producers, writers and actors (actually, writers and everyone) and, of course, men and women. Catrin, who quickly becomes invaluable in the male-dominated production team, has a classic love-hate relationship with her new coworker Tom, a dashing and depressed screenwriter played by Sam Claflin (Finnick in The Hunger Games); she also bonds with the film’s reluctant star, played to prima donna perfection by Bill Nighy. The film veers even further into comedic territory after the Secretary of War requests they develop an American character (Jake Lacey) to attract U.S. audiences. But this isn’t a total romp. Screenwriter Gaby Chiappe, who adapted Lissa Evans’s novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, finds a delicate balance between light romcom and historical drama, punctuating the film’s most unabashedly sentimental moments with a few Blitz-related bursts of violence and pathos. There’s love in the air, but there are also German bombers.
That lingering dread provides Their Finest with the existential weight behind its best moments—like the expertly staged scene in which Catrin writes a love letter in script form, and the movie-within-the-movie cast’s gorgeous, wistful sing-along to “Wild Mountain Thyme.” When death could be around every corner or in the echo of every siren, romance is more romantic, comedy is a little funnier, and a happy ending of any kind feels like a small miracle.
While its pacing often stutters and is, at times, strangely hard to follow (the movie tends to zip through large chunks of time without providing much notice), Their Finest irons out those minimal wrinkles by its shimmering, shameless tearjerker of a third act. There is a lot to be said for a movie this earnest and satisfying, and, frankly, no one’s been saying enough.
