National Post (National Edition)
DARKEST HOUR
IN OLDMAN’S CAPABLE HANDS, CHURCHILL LIVES FOR US AS A MAN AS BRASH IN LIFE AS HE WAS ELEGANT IN LANGUAGE.
‘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 the new biographical drama Darkest Hour. He was praising Churchill proper: a world-historical actor in the theatre of war. That vigour, Berlin felt, was “appropriate to a man who knows that his work and his person will remain objects of scrutiny and judgment to many generations.” And with Darkest Hour, here we are, 75 years later, submitting the work and the person to scrutiny and judgment all over again. Perhaps the film is histrionic. Perhaps that’s appropriate to history.
Darkest Hour is an account of the life with a narrow point of concentration: less than a month, beginning with Churchill’s appointment to the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on the 10th of May to the end of the evacuation of Dunkirk on the 4th of June, 1940. But of course 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, to be sure. 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. Consider the scenario as we come upon it on-screen: the House of Commons is in disarray. Churchill, controversially, has been called upon to replace Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) as Prime Minister, 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 is certain that 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, if one is less than keenly familiar with the history; 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. But what Churchill accomplished doesn’t need to be aggrandized or exaggerated. 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), whose proximity makes her an ideal biopic heroine and vantage point on the action. President Roosevelt really did insist upon 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) really did intrigue to unseat Churchill if he declined to accept Italian mediation in German peace talks — and thus the pair really were, if not quite villains, certainly Churchillian foes. And most importantly, Churchill really did inspire the nation with his confidence and oratory. He may not have shaken hands with the punters on the tube, as the movie imagines (in its most fanciful invention). But one forgives the indulgence, because it really is impossible to overstate the extent to which Churchill galvanized the whole of Britain.
Darkest Hour is not a film of warfare but of war rooms — of crises of morale and cataclysms of conscience. At the heart of the film is the principled stubbornness that distinguished Churchill from his fellow parliamentarians, and, in the final estimation, clinched Allied victory. Director Joe Wright, in thrall to the ostentatious possibilities of the story, almost despite himself lays bare the quandary: Churchill found it strictly unacceptable to negotiate terms of peace with the Germans. (“We shall tolerate no parley,” as he told the nation.) Halifax, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, met with Mussolini’s London ambassador about arranging for Italian mediation in peace talks. It was strongly felt at the time that to refuse the possibility of terms was unconscionably suicidal. Churchill felt — and history proved him right — that where the Nazis were concerned peace could never be an option.
In Oldman’s capable hands Churchill lives for us as a man as brash in life as he was elegant in language. What comes through most of all is a superabundance of character. And what the performance reaffirms — perhaps unnecessarily, given Churchill’s undiminished stature — is that as a public figure his unapologetic boldness was not a side effect of his genius but was the very marrow of it. Halifax and Chamberlain failed to perceive the strategic value of Churchill’s brazen fortitude and theatrical bluster. What they could not understand — and what Darkest Hour concludes wisely — is that wars can be won on the strength of the morale leaders inspire. Churchill affected always to be that blaze of light. That’s what got the world through its hour of darkness.•••