Illuminating performance
Gary Oldman’s masterful work as Churchill in Darkest Hour inspiringly larger than life
“He speaks his memorable lines with a large, unhurried, and stately utterance in a blaze of light,” once wrote Isaiah Berlin. He wasn’t praising an actor on stage or in a film — although this account describes Gary Oldman’s performance as Winston Churchill in this new biographical drama.
Darkest Hour has a narrow point of concentration — less than a month, beginning with Churchill’s appointment to the office of prime minister on May 10, to the end of the evacuation of Dunkirk on the June 4, 1940. At no other time did the 20th century furnish the world with 25 consecutive days of more momentous tumult or intensive activity. Churchill felt at the time as if he were “walking with destiny” — as if, as he said at the time, “all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”
The movie makes clear that magnitude. Its subject is what Churchill called the “tragic simplicity and grandeur of the times and issues at stake.”
Tragic simplicity and grandeur — this is an auspicious basis for drama. And it seems both agreeable and laughable how harmoniously the events of
Churchill’s first weeks in office accord with the conventions of a gripping mainstream film. The House of Commons is in disarray. Churchill, controversially, has been called upon to replace Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), and his curriculum vitae of military blunders continues to dog him.
France has been stormed and is poised to succumb to the German blitzkrieg. England’s armies are in hopeless retreat. Hitler’s domination of the continent seems all but assured — and it’s certain Britain will be invaded next.
The details, almost uniformly, seem in retrospect unimprovably thrilling. It is possible for one to watch Darkest Hour in a state of near-constant semi-disbelief. So much of what is supposed to have transpired, so many of the close calls and miraculous revelations, have the slick brio of apocryphal cliché, as if the truth had been punched up for sensation. What Churchill did — and how circumstance conspired to oppose him — really was sensational. If the film sometimes feels larger than life, it’s because life was outsized at that moment.
Churchill really did share a confidence and affinity with his personal secretaries, including Elizabeth Nel (Lily James). U.S. president Roosevelt really did insist on the sanctity of the Neutrality Act, refusing to ship surplus arms or deliver artillery already paid for even after Churchill pleaded for them. Chamberlain and Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane), wanted to unseat Churchill if he declined to accept Italian mediation in German peace talks. And Churchill really did inspire the nation with his confidence and oratory.
In Oldman’s capable hands, Churchill lives for us as a man as brash in life as he was elegant in language.