Courage, said Ernest Hemingway, is “grace under pressure”—which is also a good description of the quality that people once most valued in a leader. It’s clearly present, for example, in Shakespeare’s description of Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt:
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Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him,
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of color
To the weary and all-watchèd night,
But freshly looks and overbears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty,
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks.
In our own time, a standout example of grace under pressure is the image of Donald Trump, his face still bloody from the bullet that, seconds before, had come less than an inch from taking his head off, struggling through his protective circle of Secret Service agents to urge the potentially panicked crowd to “Fight, fight, fight.” Not that this impressed many of those who profess to value empathy more than courage in a leader.
As you might expect, there is a lot of pressure in a movie called Pressure—both the high-pressure decision-making of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) about when to launch the D-Day invasion of Europe in June 1944 and the approaching low-pressure weather system that threatens to scupper that invasion. But of grace, there is somewhat less.
Not that this quality is completely absent. The picture’s prime example of grace under pressure is Group Captain (the rank equivalent of an American colonel) James Stagg (Andrew Scott) of the Royal Air Force’s weather service, who is said to have been recommended to Eisenhower by Churchill only days before (it was actually months before) as the best meteorologist to predict the D-Day weather and thus to make the final determination as to when the invasion could happen.
The pressure on Group Captain Stagg from Eisenhower and his generals, as well as from his American counterpart, Col. Irving Krick (Chris Messina), with whom he profoundly disagrees, to say that the invasion is good to go on June 5 is well-nigh irresistible. And yet he resists it—with the result that D-Day is postponed until June 6—and succeeds instead of failing.
It really is an inspiring tale, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making Stagg look like the hero of D-Day, not Eisenhower, who comes off looking more like a bully than a courageous leader of men. As Peter Campbell has written for Law & Liberty:
The Ike of Pressure is a blustery worrywart who always seems to be on the verge of pummeling his subordinates. A leadership style that relied solely on intimidating subordinates was almost the antithesis of [the real] Ike’s.
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The personal drama of Group Captain Stagg’s standing up to his bullying superiors; his feud with Col. Krick, later resolved with an act of generosity on his part in seeking the other’s counsel; and keeping his mind on his business even when his pregnant wife is said to be in a bombed hospital, her fate unknown—all this presumably takes center stage in the film because the world-historical drama of D-Day itself, just offstage apart from a brief montage that takes up about 10 of the picture’s 100 minutes, is to a contemporary audience too overwhelming, even too unreal by comparison.
Movie audiences today want something on a more human scale, where individual emotion is given more importance than it can be allowed in the gigantic clash of armies and nations. We who are citizens of what Jonathan Alpert calls Therapy Nation admire emotional expressiveness and not emotional stolidity. It may be different in the armed services — I certainly hope it is — but not in Hollywood, nor in the movies Hollywood makes about the armed services.
For it was once an essential part of an officer’s training in the U.S. Army—perhaps it still is—never to show fear in the face of the enemy, as enlisted men inevitably pick up on it and see it as a justification of their own fears. But in Pressure’s montage of combat, mentioned above, all the actors playing soldiers waiting to go ashore in Normandy have apparently been told to put on the appearance of being frightened out of their wits. This is what, apparently, people want to see in the sensitive movie heroes of today, not the insouciant courage of a Henry V. I’m certainly not the first to observe that nowadays, we admire victims more than we do victors.
In short, we no longer honor and admire courage so much as we do intelligence, which is one reason why Pressure wants to make a weatherman—a scientist, or what the Brits call a boffin—the real hero of D-Day. Another is that Henrican grace under pressure on the part of military brass hats doesn’t look authentic to movie audiences today. We don’t want to see Hollywood’s leading men sporting a “cheerful semblance and sweet majesty.” We want to see them emoting.
Nothing wrong with that, you may say, and Pressure does the limited thing it set out to do pretty well. All the same, I can’t help thinking that we’re missing something we can’t very well do without in this tough old world.
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