The clock strikes… meh

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This article was published 27/03/2021 (1685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By any standard, director Andy Goddard’s Six Minutes to Midnight is an odd entry into the realm of the English espionage movie.

This isn’t some John le Carré-esque deep dive into the twisted mechanics of British intelligence. In fact, the film’s whole reason for existence turns on an interesting historical tidbit.

In the 1930s, a girls finishing school — the Augusta-Victoria College — was run in plain sight on the south coast of England in Bexhill-on-Sea. The place specialized in providing an English education to German girls, many the daughters of the Nazi elite, including Heinrich Himmler’s goddaughter and Joachim Von Ribbentrop’s daughter. The place was closed at the start of Winston Churchill’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939.

Bexhill-on-Sea happens to be the birthplace of female-identifying comedian Eddie Izzard, whose interest in the institute was aroused when she once caught sight on the provocative school crest in a local museum, bearing a Union Jack on its left corner and a swastika on the right.

Izzard partnered with writer-actor Celyn Jones on a screenplay and, thus, we get a warmed-over thriller that sees Izzard cast as Thomas Miller, an English agent of German paternity. Miller comes to the school after the suspicious death of the previous teacher, also an English agent. Evidently, the man had learned of an insidious plot that involves Brits who are supportive of the Nazi takeover of Britain.

Taking over the class, Miller gets a cool reception from the school’s frosty English headmistress Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench), but finds a possible ally with her German assistant Ilse (Carla Juri). Those hostilities and alliances go through some changes when Miller comes into possession of an easily discovered list of English collaborators to the German march to power, resulting in some feeble attempts by director Andy Goddard at Hitchcockian suspense. These attempts involve lots of running on the part of Izzard, who happens to be a seasoned marathon runner.

Alas, all that running just forestalls inevitable plot points. Goddard doesn’t have Hitchcock’s gift for putting the viewer in a sweat over the hero’s race against time. But then, nothing in this movie’s script really holds up to scrutiny. Are we to believe the girls’ lives are in danger? What are these girls even doing at this place, given that headmistress Rocholl seems to be running it as a glorified charm school with the lasses walking in circles with books atop their heads to teach poise?

History shows Nazi Germany did indeed have friends in high places — including the Royal Family — in the run-up to the Second World War, but this movie stays relatively vague on that point, keeping that threat from within maddeningly oblique.

The film has a couple of grace notes, as when Miller ironically teaches his class to sing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, a popular song among English soldiers in the First World War. As Miller, Izzard makes for an unconventional hero — the girls tease the teacher for being “unmanly” — but Miller’s back story is too vague to compel speculation beyond that.

For a movie that was inspired by a detail on an English school crest, it’s ironic that the whole film should be undone by a lack of detail in its telling.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing