Keep calm and embalm

News to no one, but there is a major nostalgia problem at the movies. Remakes, sequels, premakes, prequels, three-makes, three-quels and any sort of semi-recognizable brand names dominate the multiplex. Only one director is currently permitted to make money-is-no-object, off-brand, “thinking person’s” blockbusters, and sadly, it’s Christopher Nolan. And the art house theater, once a bulwark against Hollywood myopia and vapidity, in all but a handful of American cities exclusively delivers the same sort of pandering and auburn-tinged fixes as the big-budget junkyards.

The latest simpering nonsense is Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest, two godforsaken hours of buttery drivel smothered in rancid nostalgia. Based on a novel by Lissa Evans, the film tells the story of fledgling writer Catrin (Gemma Arterton), who teams with and falls for her male superior Tom (the thoroughly uninteresting Sam Claflin, doing a Nicholas Hoult impression and failing to pull off even that meager trick) on a British government-sponsored propaganda picture. Arterton and Claflin have little chemistry, and there’s no spark in the writing, but the soundtrack insists that their characters are made for each other, so off we go.

Along the way, the picture picks up a narcissistic ex-star (Bill Nighy), a lunkhead American celebrity soldier (Jake Lacy), and a vast number of government-mandated subplots and cuts. As with most portrayals of “classic” Britishness, Their Finest is not designed for British audiences as much as for foreign anglophiles, and as such it’s certain to please the “By Jove!” aficionados in its intended audience. But to anyone who isn’t instantly tickled by the nonstop fetishizing of reductive and redundant stiff-upper-lip-ism, Their Finest feels like one long Keep Calm and Carry On meme.

The problem with this sort of phony nostalgia isn’t that it’s obsessed with the past, but that it’s obsessed with lying about the past, with decontextualizing the past, with making the past inferior and unthreatening, like an animal at the zoo. Their Finest chuckles with superiority at the studio demand for “clean moral lines,” but still jumps through half a dozen moral hoops to justify Catrin’s snogging Tom instead of her husband.

It’s a film that clucks its tongue at the shocking… just shocking notion of government intrusion into the movies, even though the opening credits read “The Welsh Government Presents.” But perhaps it’s merely a hilarious coincidence that the fictional propaganda film they’re making also features Welsh heroines? I don’t mind that Their Finest is wrong; I mind that it’s full of shit.

But adrift in the dross, two life lines: Nighy, of course, rapidly approaching international-treasure status, here playing a fading and egomaniacal actor as only he could—as both a tribute to classically dashing leading men and as a self-lacerating satire of that same classical dash. Then there is the liquid steel of Arterton, an actress so outrageously beautiful she almost never gets credit for combining strength and vulnerability in such a consistently interesting manner. They rise above the nostalgic muck, but when will we?