Jeremy Irons is on top form as Neville Chamberlain in a Robert Harris adaptation that melds fact with enjoyable fiction
There’s a great turn from Jeremy Irons as the careworn appeaser Neville Chamberlain in this breezy what-if political thriller, adapted from the page-turner by Robert Harris and directed by Christian Schwochow. It’s set at the notorious 1938 Munich conference, convened by Adolf Hitler to force the cringing western powers into giving him the Czech Sudetenland.
With some generous revisionism, this film makes the case for Chamberlain’s savvy negotiating powers and heroic self-sacrifice: he was apparently buying time for
British rearmament and exposing Hitler as a bully at the cost of his own reputation. The movie even includes some eyebrow-raising dialogue on the plane home, after Chamberlain has got Hitler to sign that piece of paper promising peace, in which the prime minister predicts that if the Führer ever broke his promise, he would call down world fury on himself – and even bring the Americans into the resulting war! Could Chamberlain have come within a mile of foreseeing that? Or is the movie’s tongue in its cheek?