Military Wives

A just-about-strong-enough version of British-inspirational-film by numbers, in this case about the wives left behind at a base while their partners are serving in Afghanistan. It never entirely reckons with the tougher elements of the material, although it seems apparent if the script wanted to go there then Kristin Scott-Thomas and Sharon Horgan absolutely could make it happen - but instead the strange culture of a military base where the wives somehow inherit the rank of their husbands in social positioning only really gets a surface-level examination. The singing is beautiful, Scott-Thomas does the stiff-upper-lip-concealing-acres-of-pain thing well, and Horgan is reasonable given the underwritten character she's left with (none of her struggles really feel like very big struggles, and her multiple subplots kinda just pile up rather than informing one another). Yet it still pays in an inspirational finale.