Dir.
Stephen Poliakoff, UK, 2009, 129 mins
Cast:
Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie
Review by
Carol Allen
Although their writing is very different, one thing writer/director Stephen Poliakoff has in common with the late Harold Pinter is a very idiosyncratic and literate verbal style, which could be described as formalised realism. Actors love working with him, which is why he always attracts such distinguished casts, but audiences and some critics, used to a less literary style of story telling, are sometimes a bit put off. But I will come clean and admit that I am a fervent Poliakoffian and I really enjoyed this film.
The story deals with a subject Poliakoff has shown an increasing interest in over the last few years - recreating the past which has created our present. The "glorious 39" of the title is 1939, a year when England enjoyed a beautiful summer ,as the country stood on the brink of the Second World War. Anne Keyes (Garai) is the adopted daughter of wealthy Conservative MP Alexander (Nighy) and the apple of her father's eye. She has two younger siblings, the birth children of Alexander and his wife Maud (Jenny Agutter) - Ralph (Eddie Redmayne) and Celia (Juno Temple). While in the political world Chamberlain's appeasement policy is falling apart and Hitler prepares to invade Poland, Anne and her family are enjoying an idyllic summer in their Norfolk country home. But that outside world starts to encroach, when a young MP (David Tennant), who opposes appeasement and supports Winston Churchill's view that war is both right and inevitable, is found murdered. At the same time Anne accidentally comes across some secret recordings in her father's outhouse. As Anne tries to find out the origins of these recordings, she comes to realise that her family is part of an English elite, who are determined to protect their privileged way of life and avoid war at all costs and that she is in danger from the people she most trusts, her own family.
This is a totally engrossing mystery thriller, which sometimes has touches of John Buchan's "Thirty Nine Steps" in its telling. It has a meticulous sense of period and is impeccably acted under Poliakoff's strong direction by a top notch cast. Garai is a determined heroine, as the girl who turns out to be the cuckoo in this well lined, self protective nest. Nighy's benign manner masks the ruthlessness of his characteer's determination, which is in conflict with his genuine affection for Anne, and there is strong support from Christie as the comically eccentric but rather scary aunt, who's charged with the task of keeping Anne away from the action, Redmayne as her foreign officer employee brother and Agutter as Maud, who appears oblivious to what's going on around her, as she busies herself with tending her garden, while Jeremy Northam is a sinister presence in the background as an enigmatic government operative, who is assisting the appeaser plotters.
Poliakoff was born in London in 1952, the child of an Anglo Jewish mother and a Russian Jewish father. It is a chilling thought that, had the real life counterparts of the Keyes family and their fellow conspirators succeeded in their aims, England may well have surrendered to Hitler's conquering ambitions and Stephen himself and the other English Jews of his generation might never have been born.
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