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Gary Oldman, rather surprisingly, rather is Churchill during his Darkest Hour |
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Gary Oldman (Winston Churchill), Kristin Scott Thomas
(Clementine Churchill), Lily James (Elizabeth Layton), Ben Mendelsohn (George
VI), Stephen Dillane (Lord Halifax), Ronald Pickup (Neville Chamberlain), Samuel
West (Anthony Eden), David Schofield (Clement Atlee), Malcolm Storry (General
Ironside), Richard Lumsden (General Ismay), Joe Armstrong (John Evans), Adrian
Rawlins (Air Chief Marshall Dowding), David Bamber (Vice-Admiral Ramsay)
One of my favourite ever TV series is Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, a chronicle of Churchill’s
time out of government (basically 1929-1939). It covers the political clashes
between Churchill and his rivals brilliantly, as well as giving us a real
feeling for Churchill’s own personality and flaws and featured a brilliant
performance from Robert Hardy. Darkest
Hour takes off almost where that series ends – and I think it might just be
a spiritual sequel. And, for all its flaws, I might even grow too really like
it.
Joe Wright’s Darkest
Hour is a beautifully filmed, imaginatively shot retelling of the crucial
first month of Churchill’s premiership. Wright uses a great device of flashing
the date up (in an imposing screen-filling font) as each day progresses. Apart
from brief moments, the action rarely leaves Whitehall, with the focus kept
tightly on the politics at home. Will Churchill win over the war cabinet to
continue the war, or not? It revolves around dialogue shot with tension and
excitement, and is structured key Churchill speeches: each carrying all the
emotional impact you could expect and beautifully performed, with goose-bump
effect by Gary Oldman.
Because yes, this film’s one piece of genuine excellence,
and what it is really going to be remembered for, is the brilliance of Oldman’s
performance. This is one of those transformative performances where the actor
disappears. Of course it’s helped by the make-up, but there is more to it than
that. The voice, the mannerisms, movement, emotion – as a complete recreation of
the man it’s just about perfect. Whatever the film’s flaws, Oldman nails it.
Sure it’s larger than life – but so was Churchill.
Oldman’s Churchill is irascible, demanding and temperamental
– but he’s also warm and humane. In one beautiful moment he conducts a
conversation with an un-encouraging Roosevelt, where his features seems to
shrivel and shrink with despair, while his voice keeps up the optimism. Moments
of gloom hit home, but there is also humour (and Oldman is actually rather
funny in the lead role). There’s moments of pain, guilt and depression – it’s
terrific.
However it does mean some of the other actors scarcely get a
look in. Kristin Scott Thomas in particular gets a truly thankless part, no
less than four times having to counsel a depressed Churchill with variations on
“You’re a difficult but great man and your whole life has been leading to this
moment” speeches. Lily James actually gets a more interesting part as
Churchill’s admiring secretary, getting the chance to be frightened, awed,
amused and frustrated with the Prime Minister – and she does it very well, even
if her part is a standard audience surrogate figure.
The characters are neatly divided in the film: they are
either pro- or anti-Churchill. The “pro” characters largely get saddled with
standing around admiringly around the great man (Samuel West gets particularly
short-changed as Eden becomes Churchill’s yes man). The “anti” characters
mutter in corridors about how unpredictable and dangerous he is, how he could
wreck the country etc. etc.
To be fair to the film, it does at least treat the doubts of
Halifax (Stephen Dillane – all clipped repression, he’s excellent) and
Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup – serpentine and tactical, although Chamberlain’s
hold over the Tory party was nowhere near as great as this film suggests) as
legitimate concerns. It does weight the dice in favour of Churchill, and we
don’t get enough time to fully understand the reasons why peace with Hitler
might have seemed reasonable in 1940 (tricky to get across to a modern audience
so aware of Hitler’s status as evil incarnate). But Halifax’s stance that it
was better to cut your losses than fight on to destruction is at least treated
sympathetically, rather than making him a spineless weasel (as others have
done).
The film really comes to life with the conflict between the Halifax-Chamberlain
alliance and a (largely alone) Churchill. The cabinet war room clashes have a
fire, energy and sense of drama to them that a lot of the rest of the film
doesn’t always have. It sometimes drags and gets lost in filling the time with
“quirky” moments with Churchill. There is a bit too much domesticity that feels
irrelevant when we know the fate of the nation is at stake.
But then this is a sentimental film. Not only is it in love
with Churchill (we see some blemishes, but his air of perfection goes
unpunctured), but it uses devices that feel
as you are watching them like sentimental film devices. None more so than
Churchill bunking down on a tube train to exchange encouraging words with
regular people and for them to tearfully recite poetry at each other. In fact
it’s a testament to Oldman that he largely gets this hopelessly fake-feeling
scene working at all.
Wright’s film makes a point later of demonstrating that –
reporting back to the Tory party the results of this conversation – Churchill
uses the names of the people he met, but completely replaces their words with
his own. But it still gets itself bogged down in this sentimentality –
including a teary end caption on Churchill being voted out of office. Every
scene with Churchill and Clementine has a similar chocolate box feel, as does a
late scene with George VI (who seems to flip on a sixpence between pro and
anti-Churchill – although Ben Mendholsen is very good in the role).
Darkest Hour is an
extremely well-made film. It’s told with a lot of energy – and it has a simply
brilliant lead performance. Joe Wright finds new and interesting ways to shoot
things: there are some great shots which frame Churchill in strips of light
surrounded by imposing darkness. But its not brilliant. It will move you – but
that is largely because it recreates actual real-life, moving events (who can
listen to Churchill without goosebumps?). But it’s given us one of the greatest
Churchill performances and it’s worth it for that if nothing else. And, for all
its flaws, and the safeness of its storytelling, I actually quite liked it –
and I think I could like it more and more as I re-watch it.
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