As Churchill, Oldman shines bright in ‘Darkest Hour’
Gary Oldman tosses a top hat into the Oscar ring with a masterful performance as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s moving historical drama “Darkest Hour.”
It may be a bit “Masterpiece Theatre”-ish overall to be a complete triumph,
and we just had a fine film about Churchill and the challenge of facing the Nazi threat early this year with “Churchill,” featuring a great Brian Cox as old “Winnie.” But Oldman knocks it out of the park, and the film boasts Academy Award-worthy turns by Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill and Lily James as Churchill’s young secretary Elizabeth Layton.
The Nazis are sweeping across Western Europe and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a glassy-eyed Ronald Pickup) is sick, scorned and about to resign. Someone else must become prime minister at this darkest hour. A nervous King George VI (a wonderful Ben Mendelsohn) does not want Churchill for several reasons, two of which are Churchill’s heavy drinking and belligerence. The king prefers the haughtily condescending Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), who is eager to negotiate a peace with the Nazi lunatic.
At the same time, the British Expeditionary Force, its entire existing army, is cut off from home on the beaches of Dunkirk without means of escape from the Nazi Panzer tank columns closing in on all sides. Of course, Christopher Nolan made a mostly brilliant and marvelously immersive film about “Dunkirk” released in July.
“Darkest Hour,” which was scripted by Anthony McCarten (“The Theory of Everything”), is a different animal, more conventional in its storytelling and character development than the backand-forward/no-main-characters “Dunkirk,” for sure.
“Darkest Hour” does not show us the retreat or extraction, although we see a fleet of civilian vessels on their way to rescue their country’s young men. But what Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema do with Imax cameras, Wright and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (“Amelie”) do with painterly compositions and pools of milky light and scenes bestowed with pomp and majesty, as was intended, by existing imperial architecture. “Darkest Hour” is also a maze of interiors and exteriors, especially the bunker-like war rooms, lit by Rembrandt.
To his Sid Vicious, Dracula, Joe Orton, George Smiley, Commissioner Gordon and Sirius Black, Oldman can now add the Shakespeareand Cicero-loving Winston Churchill, or “Pig” as his darling wife, Clementine, calls him while he grunts in reply. She also implores him Polonius-like to “be himself” if he wants to be liked. He drinks monumentally to tame his manifold demons, recoils at the thought of appeasement and shouts at people occasionally.
This is director Wright’s atonement for the disaster known as “Pan,” although a trip Churchill takes on the Underground to seek the common touch might seem out of Neverland. But be prepared to sob when you hear this Churchill deliver his “We will not surrender” speech. Far from perfect, he is the right Horatiuslike man at the right time to save his people from a lunatic fascist and his likeminded followers.