Darkest Hour
Joe Wright’s Winston Churchill film isn’t any sort of full-range biopic.
Instead, it concerns a very specific period of time: the British Prime Minister’s tumultuous first month in office, where, upon taking over for the ineffective Neville Chamberlain in 1940, he was faced with a failing British war effort, and the seemingly unstoppable advancement of the German troops all across Europe.
Despised within his own party, and loathed by many on the other side of Parliament, Churchill had to search deep within his own soul to keep England from admit-
ting defeat and accepting the Nazi terms of surrender — Chamberlain’s preferred plan — and the country from collapsing onto itself altogether.
The stakes being what they were, as you can imagine, there was a great deal of backroom jostling within Churchill’s somewhat chaotic war chambers, and a great deal of Parliamentary procedure to wade through, which Wright’s film painstakingly documents, one exasperating meeting at a time. In short, this is not a film with much in the way of physical action, other than methodical, near-maniacal drinking. For a quick report on what was actually going on outside the hallowed walls of Churchill’s bunker and Buckingham Palace, I would urge you to watch a timely reconstruction of the proceedings across the channel
in last summer’s Dunkirk.
What we have here is the agonizing reckoning and re-calibration of a seminal figure in WWII. As we all know by now, Churchill bet on the right horse, and somewhat miraculously rallied the country around what might well have been its greatest defeat. What Wright’s film captures, above all else, is just how many ways things could have just as easily turned sideways, allowing Hitler to overtake the entirety of Western Europe.
That very real danger is enough to create sufficient friction for the nail-biting narrative, certainly, but it also helps the film tremendously that Gary Oldman’s performance as the squat, impassioned, cigar-chomping, champagne swilling PM is nothing short of revelatory. Fans of Oldman — for his talents, if not his actual more pricklish personality — have seen him go deep underground into characters
many times before: a scant perusal of his extensive filmography has him portraying Dylan Thomas, Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Orton, Dracula, Beethoven, Commissioner Gordon, Sirius Black and George Smiley. He’s most certainly the only actor in history to play one of Britain’s most irascible, conservative prime ministers, and Sid Vicious, and to do both with equal distinction.
But this is no mere Oscar-bait role, designed to abscond with the trophy and become instantly forgotten. He plumbs the depths of Churchill’s character in order to give us a three-dimensional take on the iconic, dour-faced politician. Aided in no small part by the humanizing turn given by Kristin Scott Thomas, as Churchill’s wizened wife, Clementine, the film presents its deeply flawed hero with his considerable booze-soaked baggage, and yet makes a case for how, against all rational hope, he
was the right man for the job anyway.
It shouldn’t be considered much of a spoiler to suggest that despite all the disaffection from within his own party and his own selfdoubt, Churchill eventually determined the best course of action for England, and by proxy, the rest of the free world.
The film culminates with his rousing “We Will Fight” speech that essentially galvanized the country after Operation Dynamo brought back the ragtag fleet carrying soldiers off the beaches of France and back home. Had England stuck with its sitting prime minister, Chamberlain, it most certainly would have been engulfed by the Nazi war machine.
It might seem hard to imagine now, but here was an example of a compromise candidate whom almost no one really wanted in office, turning out to be the best choice possible.