Biopics surrender to fictions
Recent films about Winston Churchill fail to live up to legacy of the man, Ian Smillie writes.
Gary Oldman has won the Golden Globes’ Best Actor award for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the much-praised Darkest Hour, an appreciably better film than the lamentable Churchill, which preceded it in 2017.
In Churchill, the British former prime minister is portrayed as a blithering ninny who has to be slapped out of his fear over the coming D -Day landings by a much tougher Clemmie, his wife.
In Darkest Hour, set during an earlier moment in the war, Churchill is stronger and more confident, but the film suffers from a need to cram all sorts of background, half-truths and urban legend into the tale. So we get a lot of drinking, the compulsory bathtub scene and a list of alleged Churchillian failures. Famous Churchillian quotes from various eras are larded into the single month covered in this film (May 1940). And what elsewhere might be called plagiarism, here passes for dramatic scriptwriting: Lord Halifax says, as the film ends, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Great ending, and maybe Halifax did say it, but if he did, he heard it from Edward R. Murrow who didn’t actually coin the phrase until 14 years later.
Darkest Hour centres on the rivalry between Churchill and Halifax, who was passed over for the prime ministership in part because Labour Leader Clement Attlee would not tolerate an appeaser as leader of a coalition government. According to the film, Chamberlain and Halifax conspire to bring Churchill down — only days after his appointment — because of Churchill’s reluctance to let Mussolini negotiate an armistice. Halifax, according to this scenario, would then have become prime minister.
So the crisis in the film is a protracted sequence in which Churchill begins to doubt himself and the idea of “fighting on.” He finally bucks up, however, when the King sits with him on a bed in a dimly lit storage room at 10 Downing Street. Then Churchill gets lost on the Underground where a bunch of plucky Londoners encourage him to “Never surrender. Never!” I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the passengers break into a musical number — perhaps something like “Consider Yourself One of the Family.”
Churchill and the King did become close, but probably not during a three-minute episode in a box room, and if the prime minister ever got lost on the Underground this is missing from the official record. In actual fact, while Halifax did promote the idea of Mussolini as a peace broker, there is no evidence that Churchill, or Chamberlain for that matter, took the idea seriously, even for a moment. In his handwritten diary for May 26, Chamberlain wrote, “The P.M. disliked any move toward Musso,” adding that it would be “incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept.” Churchill never dithered, so the cinematic crisis is a false one, ignoring all the other dramatic possibilities that the situation presents.
Although Brian Cox played a silly version of the man in Churchill, he makes an arguably better visual Winston than Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour. It is further a mystery why director Joe Wright required Oldman to yell the famous we-will-fight-them-on-the-beaches speech. Churchill spoke much more evenly (you can check it online), not least because he wanted people to hear the words rather than the voice. Consider Oldman’s “We will never surrender,” with his emphasis on surrender — as though there might have been some other thing that would never be done — and Churchill’s own emphasis instead, on never. And listen to Churchill as he talks about fighting on, “if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” His very dark alone, without any histrionics, is perhaps the most powerful and important word in the whole speech.
Ads for Darkest Hour say it is, “The Untold True Story”. This is a bit backward. The true bits have certainly been told before; the untrue bits have not.
Remarkably, despite all the current film and TV interest in Churchill, historical reality seems to be slipping away from us. Perhaps the most inspired recent Churchillian film moment is a scene in Dunkirk when troops on a train, back in England at last, simply read his “beaches” speech from a newspaper. You get the words rather than the voice, which is what Churchill intended.