DAN WEBSTER:
In World War I, the conflict once grandly if naively referred to as “The War to End All Wars,” some 880,000 British troops were killed. This amounted to a full 6 percent of the UK’s adult male population.
Any number of movies, narrative and documentary, have explored this tragedy. What makes Nicholas Hytner’s feature film The Choral unique is that it does more than simply focus on the effects the war had on a small English village. It also examines the jingoistic attitudes that wars tend to fuel while keying on the hostility thrown at a man who dares to value art over nationalism.
Directed by Hytner from a script by playwright Alan Bennett, The Choral takes place in 1916. It’s a time when, desperate to fill its depleted ranks, the English government is conscripting able men ages 18 to 41. Meanwhile, those civilians who are ineligible to serve shame those who haven’t been drafted, urging them to enlist on their own.
One of the villagers who joins up is the local choirmaster. And to fill his place, the choral group’s ruling board seeks a replacement. Headed by the owner of the village mill, Alderman Bernard Duxbury (played by Roger Allam), the board makes a controversial, if natural, choice.
He’s Dr. Henry Guthrie (played by Ralph Fiennes), whose musical experience was honed in, of all places, Germany. If that isn’t bad enough, he’s an atheist (a definite no-no in this fictional part of England), and he isn’t a “family man” —a veiled, slurred reference to his presumed sexual orientation.
Guthrie, too, doesn’t win any friends by suggesting that the choral perform works by noted German composers, including Bach. Eventually, though, he compromises and settles on “The Dream of Gerontius,” a work by the real-life English composer Edward Elgar. The problem he then faces is to find the right voices, particularly among the still available young men.
In most respects, The Choral clearly follows an old-school storyline, one as familiar as a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie about people trying to overcome the difficulties involving the cobbling together of a show. To his credit, screenwriter Bennett adds in several subplots to round things out.
There’s the young soldier, Clyde (played by Jacob Dudman), once listed as missing but back from the war though without one of his arms. There’s Bella (played by Emily Fairn), once Clyde’s girl but now in love with someone else.
Guthrie’s pianist Robert (played by Robert Emms) announces that he’ll seek to avoid military service by declaring as a conscientious objector, a stance that is likely to earn him a prison sentence. And Guthrie himself, while facing the hard choice of replacing Alderman Duxbury as lead tenor with sweet-voiced former soldier Clyde, also is grieving a painful, personal, war-time loss.
Time, too, is a factor because several of the boys are soon going to be called up. If all that isn’t enough, Guthrie must convince the composer Elgar to allow the choral to perform his master work—which is no easy feat, considering the village’s lack of a full orchestra.
As banal as all this might seem as a plot, Hytner benefits from the work of his cast. Fiennes, who has performed in everything from the works of Shakespeare to the films of Wes Anderson, is perfect as the doleful Guthrie. Allam as the mill owner is a kinder version of the often brusque character he’s played in British movies and television shows over the past four decades.
One surprise is Amara Okereke, the Nigerian-English actress who plays the Salvation Army volunteer Mary and whose soprano tones turn out to be just what Guthrie ends up needing.
So, yes, The Choral doesn’t add up to anything particularly original. Yet it boasts a good heart. And it does make meaningful statements about acceptance, about the need for empathy, about the absurdity of war and, most of all, the power of music to heal.
Which, let’s be clear, are attitudes that feel every bit as relevant in 2025 as they were in 1916.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.