One of my holiday entertainments was the new Netflix docudramentary four-part series Churchill At War. What is a docudramentary, you ask? It is a mixture of documentary and docudrama. As a documentary it employs archival footage and talking heads with varying degrees of expertise about Churchill and World War II, its chronological focus. It is a docudrama because it incorporates numerous re-enactments of Churchill’s activites during that period, with actors representing Churchill, many of his colleagues and interlocutors (Roosevelt, Clementine, Stalin, Lord Halifax, General Ismay), as well as extras for crowd scenes, such as his visits to areas of London bombed during the blitz.

Constructing the Text

Coming from my research on narrative, I have an ongoing interest in the techniques used in film or streaming series texts. This mini-series is very different from standard documentary. The producers enhance archival footage by colorizing it. Rather than replaying tapes of Churchill speaking, they apply AI to those tapes to “re-produce” Churchill’s voice in other contexts, such as reading his letters or diary entries. This technical updating of the material, in my view, is intended to erase the barrier between documentary and docudrama, so that one merges into the other.

The documentary doesn’t have a single narrator. (Generally, the single narrator is either the documentarist him/herself or a narrator reading text written by the documentarist.) In this series, there are – by my count – twenty-two narrator/commentators, all on-screen. These include authors who have written books about Churchill (Andrew Roberts, Boris Johnson, Jon Meacham) and politicians and speechwriters who, it is assumed, will have valuable observations about Churchill (George W. Bush, David Lammy, General Petraeus). The decentralization of narration means that the narrators are often reading material written for them by the writer(s) of the series designed to move the story along, rather than their own observations. It is only occasionally, and primarily at the end of the series, that some of the narrators provide their own thoughts and interpretations. The series appears to have one writer, Frederick Rendina, who has written other documentaries, primarily for History Channel. It has 14 producers at various levels, including Director Malcolm Venville and the renowned and ubiquitous Ron Howard.

I couldn’t find a budget for the series, but with so many people involved in production, so many actors, so many narrators, and so much technology, it must have been substantial. As is well known, Netflix has very deep pockets.

What’s To Like

The story of Churchill’s leadership during World War II is one of the most compelling of our age, as evidenced by the number of ways it has been retold. As columnist Marcus Gee observed in The Globe and Mail, Churchill’s defended democratic values that were under attack by a genocidal dictator, though it required making an alliance with another genocidal dictator. Many nations are now being led by genocidal dictators, or those aspiring to be, so Churchill’s story resonates. The combination of documentary and docudrama means that the docudrama component can’t stray too far from the historical record. For example, it provides a reasonably accurate recounting of the debate within the War Cabinet in May 1940 about whether to negotiate with Hitler, something the 2017 movie Darkest Hour failed to do, as I discussed in my blog. All these are good reasons to spend four hours watching it.

What’s Not to Like

I was willing to accept the blending of documentary and docudrama as well as colorization and AI-generated reproduction of Churchill’s voice. The thing I found unsettling was the team of narrator/commentators. I suppose it was done to make the series “relatable” in both the US and the UK, its major markets. This required having high profile talking heads from both countries. As most of the historians who wrote about Churchill are white and male, relatability also required finding female and visible-minority narrators. But the profusion of narrators confused, rather than enlightened. It seems contrived to me that they are all grinning as though they had just aced an oral exam (with the exception of George Bush, who naturally smirks). I would have preferred a lead narrator, whether seen or unseen, who then called upon a much smaller number of commentators, each of whom made clear their viewpoint or contribution to the series. My model for this approach is the 2000 PBS Series The American President, which uses an unseen narrator, media personalities (e.g. Walter Cronkite) voicing the words of various presidents, and one commentator, Richard Neustadt, the most distinguished scholar of the American presidency of his generation.

Where Is Canada (and the Rest of the Empire?)

The series made the case that the UK and its Empire could not win the war unless the US entered it. Thus it entirely omits the contribution to the war effort of Canada and the other countries of the Empire. For example, the discussion of Dunkirk mentions the evacuation of 200,000 British troops and 100,000 “partners.” The D-Day map shows the five landing beaches, but doesn’t mention that, in addition to the Americans at Omaha and Utah, and the British at Gold and Sword, the Canadians landed at Juno. At one point, Churchill is shown conversing with an unnamed grandee, the picture intended to show Churchill’s proclivity for wearing military jumpsuits referred to by the narrator as “onesies.” Canadians would have known the grandee was William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada for the war years. I guess Netflix’s quantitatively sophisticated algorithms decided that the likely Canadian (or Commonwealth) audience was not large enough to invest in any Canadian (or Commonwealth) content.

My Bottom Line

Watching this series led me to ask whether this type of docudramentary represents the future of documentary and docudrama. Contrarily, I emerged with greater admiration for documentary auteurs like Errol Morris and Ken Burns and docudrama auteurs like Ava Duvernay and Aaron Sorkin. Frederick Rendina is not in their league.