God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise (I Corinthians 1: 27)

The foolishness of Their Finest is the homespun propaganda films concocted by the British ministry during World War II.  Watching the sausage-making of morale-boosting documentaries should sour the artistic spirit. It is shamelessly manipulative, hiring a no-talent American hero to play the role of a pilot in the boat rescue of survivors from the beach at Dunkirk. The directors reason that America could be enticed to join the alliance if they saw one of their own performing heroically in the European theater of operations.

With the same transparent motives they hire Catrin Cole as a scriptwriter to make the female speakers sound more authentic and inspire British women conscripted to manufacture weapons while their husbands and boy friends fight on the continent.  And they recruit the “former matinee idol Ambrose Hilliard” to add a touch of glamor to the production.  It feels so shamelessly exploitive.

But the story is told with the backdrop of the London blitz, the endless nightly bombings by the German Luftwaffe, and the resulting carnage and demoralizing loss of life.  We witness air raids, the huddling in the underground stations, the devastation of blocks of buildings and the loss of life.  The terror and vulnerability of British civilians surrounds the studio where the sausage is being made, and the outrageous fictions seem all too necessary to prop up the fragile hope of the besieged Londoners.

So we accept the pretense of evacuating survivors of Dunkirk, because of the elevation of the timid twin sisters, who confessed their boat actually failed to reach the evacuation site. We accept the bumbling blond American pilot, whose only lines will be voice-overs read by real actors. We accept the principled scriptwriter Catrin suggesting and composing the elaborate rescue fiction. It is all the means to bolster the human spirit through pathos and tragedy.

The Bible is full of stories of the weak and foolish overwhelming the strategic and powerful. Balaam’s ass spoke and prevented him from falling to a menacing angel (Numbers 22). A backwater herdsman (Amos) spoke prophetic warnings to the urban dwellers of Israel. A small boy brought a lunch that is used to feed five thousand at the hands of Jesus (John 6:9). A blind beggar lectured the learned Pharisees on the authority of the Christ (John 9).  The stories are told in uncharacteristic detail to show what God makes of small or foolish contributions. As Paul says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.”

As there is beauty in these biblical accounts there is beauty in Their Finest, because it shows the crude constructions of propaganda inspiring a nation and elevating the status of women.  Near the final scenes of the movie, Catrin sits in the theater surrounded by working people who laugh, cry, and rejoice in her handiwork. In these sentimentally manipulative stories, she feels a purpose that had been lost during her own personal tragedy. She returns to the studio to write another script with confidence that her work matters.

Stories like Their Finest cut to the essence of the miraculous.  Our work, our speech, our mundane decisions are transformed into difference-making events or language by an unseen hand, a multiplier of small deeds into large ones. The inevitable theme is that minor actions can have major consequences, perhaps by divine intervention. The boy who shared his lunch launched a miracle, but he did nothing more than offer it to the disciples who were hopelessly trolling the crowd for food.

My take on the movie could be idiosyncratic. What appears as a miracle to me could be no more than irony to the film-makers.  Bad movies have dramatic therapeutic effects. Or perhaps it is commentary on the social productivity of art. Or the social transformation of women during the most destructive of wars. Regardless of interpretation the beauty comes of the surprising power in the most mundane plans. The foolishness of the world becomes the profundity of God.

I suppose it all comes of the hope that our mundane decisions can have meaning in an unredeemed world.