Pressure review – stormy weather in tense D-day forecast retelling

The historic gamble of D-day 1944 gets a new perspective in this slick and watchable, if slightly cheesy and unreflective, period drama, whose staginess reflects its origins in theatre; David Haig adapts his play with the director Anthony Maras. Andrew Scott – in RAF uniform, short-back-and-sides and ’tache – plays James Stagg, a brilliant Scottish meteorologist attached to the military during the war. Stagg arrives at the top-secret allied base of Southwick House in Hampshire stubbornly intent on telling allied Cmdr Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, bullishly played by Brendan Fraser, that he has an outlier forecast of bad weather, which means D-day should be delayed from Eisenhower’s planned date of 5 June.

This is to the rage of Col Irving P Krick (Chris Messina), the swaggeringly gung-ho American meteorologist who has always had Ike’s confidence until now. And if we were unsure about this character’s brash-Yank status, in his opening scene he literally shimmies and bops to the Andrews Sisters’ Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy in the operations room to the uptight, thin-lipped astonishment of Stagg who, as overall commanding officer, tells the Americans to get that piano out of there.

Krick figures they’re good to go on the 5 June, and Stagg’s obduracy also enrages the drawlingly contemptuous General Montgomery (Damien Lewis), who is mustard keen to get boots on the beach pronto. Everyone thinks they need to move right now. Stagg thinks they need to wait. But if he’s wrong, tens of thousands of personnel will die. And to top it off, his wife back in London is nine months pregnant. Pressure fronts of all sorts are closing in.

Clearly, Stagg is someone who deserves to be as well-known in the annals of maverick wartime boffindom as code-breaker Alan Turing. But I think the movie is unsure if or how much to Turing-ify the character, which perhaps explains the casting of Scott, whose very presence seems to gesture at registers of complexity and even darkness that may not actually be there. His Stagg is cold, abrupt, arrogant; he has no interest or aptitude in reading the room. He arguably has Turing’s genius – despite insisting that meteorology is not a matter of certainty but assessment of probability or even simply educated guesswork.

But Stagg clearly doesn’t have Turing’s inner pain, despite the pregnant-wife backstory; occasionally you can feel Scott as an actor straining for something in this material that will allow him to let rip. That something would appear to be his anguished fear that his wife and unborn child have been killed in a Nazi bombing raid – fears that Stagg just has to suppress. Scott cleverly has Stagg finger his wedding ring while making one of his shrill presentations to the frowning top brass. Kerry Condon plays Ike’s (real-life) private secretary Kay Summersby, whose job here is to show some female intuition and sympathy to Stagg on this point. But the movie mimics Stagg’s stoicism and it’s possible sometimes to forget what he’s silently going through.

Of course, we know that, in the end, and to quote Eisenhower in the film, “the sun’s gonna have his hat on”. It’s a slick presentation and earnestly performed, with an important story to tell.