“Did you know that weathermen are traditionally boring?” asks a kindly Irish secretary in Pressure, about the real-life wartime meteorologist James Stagg. It’s a problem that director Anthony Maras, in adapting David Haig’s 2014 stage play, valiantly tackles head-on. How do you make nerdy militarians talking, studying and map-reading in a time of crisis feel particularly cinematic? The answer is you keep it tight – Pressure is, blessedly, a lean 100 minutes – and you hire an actor with one of those great listening faces, whose moistened eyes and tight jaw can make even the stuffiest of scenes feel suddenly bright and alive.
That actor is Andrew Scott, offering an amuse-bouche before his Oscar-tipped role as the late-stage star Ian Charleson in Elsinore in January. He is Stagg, whose sterling reputation in political circles saw him recruited to predict the weather ahead of the Normandy landings. His chilly, by-the-book respect for data – however unhelpful it seems to the more gung-ho Americans – sees him clash with many of his new colleagues, particularly Damian Lewis in full moustache-twirling mode as General Bernard Montgomery, and a hammy Brendan Fraser as then-US Army General Dwight Eisenhower.
