Munich: The Edge of War — even Jeremy Irons can’t redeem Neville Chamberlain

Two wildly optimistic missions are involved in the burnished thriller Munich: The Edge of War. One we know is doomed. The other just seems like it must be. On screen, the year is 1938. The Sudetenland is for now uninvaded. The man of the darkening hour in London is still Neville Chamberlain. Throughout the film, the British prime minister pins his fate to the belief that Hitler can be managed. His famous piece of paper awaits. But the ending being a given is the least of the movie’s gambles. Adapting Robert Harris’s novel, it sets out to redeem the name of Chamberlain, British political history’s eternal embarrassment.

The PM is played by Jeremy Irons. With that the tone is set. Even the most forgiving portrait would strain to call Chamberlain magnetic, but Irons is a movie star, and his charisma here is left undimmed. A grand avuncular twinkle fills Downing Street. We also get an overlapping story of the flower of youth, introduced in a preface earlier in the 1930s: larky Oxford undergrad Hugh Legat (George MacKay); boisterous German chum Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner); Paul’s German-Jewish girlfriend Lena (Liv Lisa Fries). 

The gun is loaded for all three, of course. Legat, however, becomes our hero. Flash forward to 1938 and we find him at Number 10, a proto-spad in a panicking London. In a film of nice touches and uneasy wobbles (directed by Christian Schwochow), MacKay is a perfect match for the mood in the city. He looks, as ever, like Munch’s “The Scream” a second before opening its mouth.

Soon, he sprints down Whitehall. The sight of the actor at full pelt is familiar from Sam Mendes’s 1917, though there he scrambled across a battlefield. Here, the aim is to deliver the news that Germany has staged a move against Czechoslovakia. Peace may have a chance! That hapless crossing of fingers is a regular feature in a story of characters yet to see the script, forever 10 steps behind us (and Hitler, played by the gaunt, miscast Ulrich Matthes). And so we return to Irons’s sprightly Chamberlain, now plotting a last-gasp diplomatic triumph.

The harshest takedown of his leadership would focus here too. But Munich is the case for the defence. This Chamberlain is not driven by weakling cold feet; instead, he is desperate to save Britain from tipping back into the abyss of the first world war. If the scene where he justifies all is a scriptwriterly wheeze (a monologue pruning roses in the Downing Street garden), the history feels persuasive. But the film wants more plaudits for its hero — a master strategist too, we learn — than it can quite pull off.

It knows it as well, pivoting back to the kids and the sturdy espionage thriller it is for much of its running time, a watchable, fictional yarn of secret documents, riffing on Germany’s real anti-Nazi Oster conspiracy. Even here there are snags, though, odd creative decisions big (the Oster plot is under-explored) and small. In nobody’s 1938 did English civil servants talk of “hanging in there” and “having each other’s backs”. 

One of the film’s best images sums it up better: MacKay stumbling in a fluttering mass of Nazi flags. Yet Harris — who once skewered Tony Blair in The Ghost — has also inspired a sad, bold-spirited film about the see-saw of political reputation, and the treachery of hope.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from January 7 and on Netflix from January 21