ALSO SHOWING
Darkest Hour (PG)
Having briefly explored the chaos of Dunkirk in his earlier Ian Mcewan adaptation Atonement, director Joe Wright’s latest zooms out from that victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat miracle and zooms back in on the backroom politicking surrounding Winston Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister in the weeks preceding. The resulting film is a biopic of sorts that in its best moments reinforces the global importance of the decisions being frantically debated by the British government during those crucial days of May 1940 and in its worst evokes the reassuring nostalgia of
The King’s Speech by mythologising Churchill (played by a prosthetically enhanced Gary Oldman) once again as Britain’s greatest Briton. Which isn’t to say there’s not fun to be had in Oldman’s performance. Though the film hardly opts for a nuanced portrait, Oldman sneaks the odd trace of Sid Vicious into his portrayal of Winston as the establishment rebel willing to stick two fingers up to his critics. But as he battles and argues against the would-be appeasers in his own party, the film spells everything out and turns his enemies into moustache twirling villains instead of letting the weight of history inform the drama. Naturally it all builds up to the famous “fight them on the beaches” speech signified by the title – yet the rousing patriotic uplift of that oft-invoked piece of oratory has already been poignantly interrogated and undercut by the final moments of Christopher Nolan’s superior Dunkirk. For all Wright’s talent and Oldman’s Oscar-baiting physical transformation, Darkest
Hour is less than the sum of its parts – a high-school level history primer destined to be forgotten the moment the awards season is over.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (18)
As a grief-hardened mother determined to keep the recent rape and murder of her daughter in the minds of the local police, Frances Mcdormand is so good in Martin Mcdonagh’s Golden Globe-winner it’s impossible not to be on her side – no matter how irrational she becomes, no matter how unpleasant her views . In a world of bigoted, violent and none-too-bright men, her character, Mildred Hayes, strides through the titular (fictional) town like an avenging angel, ready to tongue-lash priests, drill holes in vindictive dentists and kick bratty teens in the crotch whenever they get in her way. She’s a force of nature, trapped by circumstance in small town purgatory and Mcdonagh fans the flames of this metaphor by puncturing the somewhat absurd plot with several arson attacks, one of which sets Sam Rockwell’s hate-filled, racist cop on a path to redemption that feels a little too easily earned. That’s not to fault Rockwell’s performance (he’s almost too good), it’s merely to point out the limits of setting up the world of Ebbing as a symbolic playground rather than a town that’s properly rooted in reality or the history of race relations in the South. Still, Mcdormand’s blazing performance is impossible to deny even if the film’s scabrous exploration of prejudice remains very much on the surface.
Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars (15)
Running through his troubled childhood, his myriad addictions and the tragic death of his toddler son, this documentary makes a worthy case for the virtuoso rock guitarist’s credentials as an authentic bluesman, albeit one whose dedication to the purity of black American music was called into question when he drunkenly championed the racist policies of Enoch Powell in the mid-1970s. To the film’s credit, it confronts Clapton on this issue, but oddly fails in the much easier task of celebrating his musicianship, thanks to the absence of any decent archival performance footage of him in his Yardbirds/cream/derek & the Dominoes prime.■