British brothers, Edward and Rory McHenry, have created an alternative to the standard account of the Battle of Britain… with puppets.
That is right, the film, Jackboots in Whitehall, puts forth a retelling of WWII in which a puppet-Hitler, voiced by Alan Cumming, of “Cabaret” and X-Men 2 fame, has taken over England. It is up to small-villager Chris, voiced by Ewan McGregor, to save the day and stop him from drilling through the English Channel into London.
“It is a World War II comedy epic,” co-director Rory McHenry said in an interview with ScreenRush. “Using puppets.” The film features the voices of Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Tom Wilkinson as Goebbels, and Rosamund Pike as McGregor’s love-interest, Daisy.
Jackboots will debut at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 20.
Although it is usually innovative and amusing to use puppets to portray actual events, this is not one of those cases. The Battle of Britain held an extensive amount of casualties and cannot be made into some sort of funny parody. One may argue that this is being shown in “good light”, because this battle was one of the key turning points for the British during WWII. Even so, it is completely tactless. People should not be laughing at a puppet Hitler, as he was behind the murder of over 60 million people.
As if the official record of history were not convoluted and debated enough so as to obfuscate any reflective moral or projective imperative, Hollywood has to further muddle the waters with their penchant for Holocaust era historical revisionism. As far as theatric representation goes, this topic ought to be approached with extreme and reverent caution. Unfortunately it is not. The argument of course is that the arts are a world of imagination and expressionism, that these alternate renditions of history are a sort of wish fulfillment. Well, we ought to concede to the harsh realities of World War II and and save our attempts at wish fulfillment for the present and future. The unchanging facts of history are inescapable and we would be best served in marrying reality to our dreams were we keep the record unmolested. The fact that such production are not intended to represent history is irrelevant. It is the cavalier approach to world-shaping and life-destroying events that worries me. I’m not sure whether the whole puppet thing makes it better or worse but the dystopian bend to this historical fantasy throws the intellectual or moral base into further question. In an age when the veracity of the Holocaust is increasingly a matter up for discussion, I believe it is important that we cleave securely and unwaveringly to what actually was.