Six Minutes to Midnight was shot as a feature and released on streaming only because of the COVID situation. Dench’s finely calibrated portrait of a woman swayed into Nazi sympathizing by the love of her charges is quite beautiful - she has a way of shadowing her face when standing in full light - but its emotional coherence casts all the other cardboard characters into stark relief. The star casting also throws the balance out of whack. (I counted six running scenes, though there may be more.) All this time, Marc Streitenfeld’s agitated score tries to gin up excitement and tension, but putting nervous strings under Nazis waggling their eyebrows at one another steers the mood toward cheeseball. This willingness to run 26.2 miles at the drop of a hat infects the screenplay so that nearly every action sequence entails Izzard running across a beach, down the pier, into a field. In the first part of this year, the real Izzard ran 32 marathons in 31 days to raise money for charity. Miller does some government-approved sleuthing, overhears the plot to move the students, gets framed for a murder, and begins running from the police. “Tell us a story,” these nearly adult women chorus at him, unbelievably, right before he teaches them to sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” When, later, there is some moist-eyed Dead Poets Society–style leave-taking between teacher and students, you will have to cast your mind back to this moment to understand everyone’s emotion. Their entire education is up to him and the games mistress, Ilse (the sensitive Carla Juri). His replacement, Miller, heads to Bexhill on a bus driven by British Treasure Jim Broadbent, meets with headmistress Miss Rocholl (Dench), and is soon teaching English to the girls, who have little swastikas stitched on their vests. He runs to the pier, then vanishes mysteriously. The film begins with Wheatley (Nigel Lindsay) fleeing the school in a panic, calling his handler at Whitehall and screaming that his cover is blown. Izzard plays Thomas Miller, a teacher sent to the school after the former English teacher, Mr. We just need to know that the hero wants them to be in place X but the villain would prefer place Y, then we can root for the right outcome. But logic, shmogic the girls are the movie’s MacGuffins, alternately seen as menacing Nazis and innocent pawns. At this point in 1939, war hadn’t been declared, so surely they could have just bought tickets home? The film swears up and down that their departure would give Germany’s game away - not, say, the 1.5 million Germans massing at the Polish border. The opportunities for intrigue in such a setting would seem to abound, though the writers settle on a weird one: the threat that the girls may be smuggled out. In the late 1930s, the Augusta Victoria College in Bexhill-on-Sea catered to young German women, operating as a finishing school for the daughters of the German High Command. Izzard and Jones are credited with the story, and they’ve certainly found an interesting little kernel of reality for it. But D’Arcy is as silly as the film itself and the only one who knows what movie he’s in.Īndy Goddard directs a script he wrote with Izzard and Celyn Jones (who appears in a small role). There are certainly other performers who emerge unembarrassed - Dench does a lovely turn from foolishness into new wisdom, for instance. The movie is dogged by wobbly reasoning and dramaturgical lassitude, but at least one actor tries to spice it up. In D’Arcy’s case, he has chosen a wildly over-egged delivery, slicing each word onto the plate as though he’s serving Christmas ham. (Question: Should it have been a television episode? The word you’re looking for is … absolutely.) Task two: The actor should infuse the narratively flat movie with some zest of his or her own. Task one: The actor is to draw out the dialogue so it occupies the longest possible amount of time, lest this underplotted, underwritten film turn out to be the same length as a television episode. “The word you’re looking for” - he bites out, giving each word its maximum metrical weight - “is danke.”ĭ’Arcy has figured out the Six Minutes to Midnight assignment and is completing it correctly. Then, with the pace of a glacier leaving Europe, he turns to face her. He registers her tone and narrows his eyes in suspicion. A cop played by James D’Arcy, wearing a detective’s fedora and a look of intense concentration, is standing near a German woman he thinks is being insufficiently grateful. There is one moment of pure kitschy delight in Six Minutes to Midnight, the weak-tea period thriller starring Eddie Izzard and Judi Dench.
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