The trailer for Ralph Fiennes’ new film, “The Choral,” which I’ve been seeing over the past month or so, whenever I go to the movies, has proved to be a bit of a bait and switch. An English period piece set during World War I, it appeared, from the marketing, it would be an inspirational story about the power of music.

Yeah, the war was a bad time, lives were destroyed, and the flower of England’s youth mowed down at the Somme. But the trailer features just enough humor to make it seem like something it’s not. I caution you not to go into it expecting a charming story of idiosyncratic British resourcefulness in the tradition of “The Full Monty,” “Kinky Boots,” or “Calendar Girls.” I’d have been happy had it been “Chariots of Fire” meets “Brassed Off.” (The latter is about England’s colliery brass bands; “The Choral” is about its amateur choral societies.)

Primarily, I got the impression that the film was going to explore musical performance as a kind of therapy for damaged soldiers returning from the front, but it really does nothing of the sort, beyond the suggestion being made in one scene, and then it’s never revisited.

Fiennes is excellent as always, as the displaced, disgraced choral director forced back to England from a satisfying career in Germany, on account of the war. His scrupulous German allusions and quotations from passages of Goethe and the “St Matthew Passion” (which the English of course sing in English) do nothing to endear him to the locals, who view his foreign connections with suspicion. After a rock comes crashing through a window during a rehearsal, it is suggested perhaps the choir should sing something else. It is to the choristers’ collective dismay that they realize that every composer they offer happens to be German – even honorary Londoner George Frideric Handel.

This is when “The Choral” pulls its rabbit out of the hat, and we discover that the rest of the film will center on an amateur performance of Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius.” What a very happy surprise!

Alas, the happiness is short-lived. Naturally because of the war, budgetary constraints, and not least the varied ability of the singers, concessions have to be made. The result is a “bold” reimagining of the oratorio that seems about as edgy as something out of “Dead Poets Society.”

Inevitably, Elgar shows up, and both his character and the casting (he’s played by the estimable Simon Russell Beale) are totally wrong. Nothing I have ever seen or read about Elgar leads me to believe he was squat, portly, and petty. Couldn’t the filmmakers even have given him a decent push broom mustache?

Perhaps it won’t bother viewers who aren’t so close to the subject, but for me it kills the movie. My guess is that the marketers kept the “Gerontius”/Elgar angle out of the trailer, because there are about five people in the U.S. who would have any idea who or what they are, much less want to see a movie about them.

More broadly, the screenplay by playwright Alan Bennett (“The Madness of George III,” “The History Boys”) is a mess, with few of the many dramatic ideas introduced in the first act (war trauma, suspicion of espionage, wounded vanity and squabbles among the singers, betrayal in love, an interracial romance that never raises an eyebrow, the plight of the homosexual and the conscientious objector in 1916) are ever satisfactorily resolved.

Like real life, then? I think it was just weak. Still, hats off to Bennett for writing another screenplay at the age of 90!

Bennett is clearly interested in English music. He wrote a play, “The Habit of Art,” about the relationship between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Ursula Vaughan Williams (Ralph’s widow) was a personal friend and appears as a character in “Lady in the Van.” So I am especially sorry that this late attempt to dramatize the import of Elgar and his music is a swing and a miss. Perhaps with a different actor. If only C. Aubrey Smith were still with us!

“The Choral” is not a bad movie. As a classical music lover, I would desperately like a film of this sort to succeed. However, if like Fiennes’ choral director I’m to be brutally honesty, I must acknowledge that it fails to hit any of the high notes.

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View the trailer here: