“Pressure”
Pressure chronicles an underappreciated aspect of D-Day (June 6, 1944), and the title offers a double-meaning. Obviously, the planning, staging, and execution of that operation involved an immense amount of pressure, but there was also the atmospheric pressure resulting in stormy and erratic weather. Those intertwined forms of pressure, and how the latter exacerbated the former, is the subject of this film.
Writer-director Anthony Maras’ debut feature, Hotel Mumbai (2019), proved brilliant: intense and intelligent, meaningful and resonant, dynamically edited and lensed. Thus, one never would have guessed that his next movie, Pressure, would prove utterly mediocre. Aside from the climactic sequence involving the Allied storming of the French beaches, there is not a single note of realism here, and precious little stylization as well. The film functions in a stilted, mechanical manner; based on a play written by David Haig, it fails to shed the staginess of its source material. (Indeed, not knowing the nature of that material, I thought at one point during the film that the movie felt a bit stagey. Yet since most World War II movies do not have their origins in theatrical plays, I never thought that it was actually based on a play until, sure enough, I learned that fact during the closing credits.) While Maras seems to provide ample visual coverage, there is little in the way of visual composition, genuine character exploration, or thematic depth, with Pressure instead operating stiffly and superficially. We “see” the pressure — the hustle-and-bustle, the theatrically exaggerated tension — but we do not exactly feel it, viscerally.
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The film’s greatest problem is its casting of Brendan Fraser as General Dwight Eisenhower. Fraser is capable of fine acting, as seen in The Whale (2022) or even a disposable comedy such as last November’s Rental Family. But as “Ike,” he is totally miscast, lacking any hint of subtlety or nuance. All bulging eyes and constantly shouted dialogue, Fraser reduces Eisenhower to the caricature of a bullfrog-throated general. Worse yet, he seems too heavy, physically, for the historical role.
On the other hand, Kerry Condon is excellent as usual, this time as Lieutenant Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s all-purpose personal assistant. And as the protagonist, British meteorologist James Stagg, Andrew Scott offers some complexities. We see a man at once arrogant and humble, willing to run roughshod over a less knowledgeable rival (cocky American meteorologist Irving Krick, played by Chris Messina) yet also awed by his own human helplessness. Stagg’s study of meteorology feeds his humility — and thus the possibility of a rapprochement with Krick. Had the film offered more visceral depth and contemplativeness, Scott’s performance could have authentically explored the layers underneath his uptight, upright surface.
Pressure also stages the aforementioned storming of the French beaches quite effectively. While it does not capture the carnage of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), and would not break any new ground regardless, it does show how horrific the experience was for so many of the soldiers. The first ones trying to depart from the boats during the amphibious landing were essentially sacrificial lambs, live-bait fodder for the German machine gun nests embedded in the cliffs, and Maras’ camera portrays this grim reality.
Most of Pressure, however, feels too contrived, too much like a staged historical reenactment. The film’s historical weight renders it watchable, but its manner is much too lightweight, skeletal, and routine. In Hotel Mumbai, Maras seemed to work from an original perspective, perhaps because his type of real-life material with that film had received little, if any, cinematic treatment. In Pressure, conversely, he makes an “in the manner of” movie, thus reducing historical intrigue to banality.
