A WINNING Winston
With a Golden Globe in the bag, a first Oscar win looks on the cards for Gary Oldman after this electrifying performance as Churchill
Darkest Hour C ert: PG 2hrs 5mins
Gary Oldman is one of those actors you could walk past in the street and not recognise – he has a quiet, unshowy ordinariness that not only allows him to disappear into the parts he plays but also does a very good job of deflecting public attention. As a result, if I try to conjure an image of what the off-duty Oldman looks like, I struggle.
But I do know that he looks absolutely nothing like Winston Churchill. And yet, for all bar the opening ten minutes of Darkest Hour, the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Harry Potter star gives such a convincing turn as Britain’s wartime hero that he’s already scooped the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama and a Bafta nomination, and must stand a decent chance of repeating that success come Oscar time.
Yes, it’s a triumph for Kazuhiro Tsuji, the Japanese genius who made the prosthetics that turn the slender, thin-faced Oldman into the portly, round-cheeked Churchill – and, indeed, for the makeup skills of David Malinowksi and Lucy Sibbick, who started work at 3am each day to begin the three-anda-half-hour transformation.
But it’s a career-defining triumph for Oldman, who doesn’t have the eyes for the part or quite the expected voice – it’s those two things that trip you up for the first 10 minutes – and yet he brings such an energy, intensity and, eventually, ferocity to the role that well before the end you’ve forgotten that any other actors have ever played the part. Putting it succinctly, Oldman gives a performance rather than an impersonation and Darkest Hour is all the better for it.
Mind you, it has other good things going for it, too – a taut, intelligent and cleverly structured screenplay by Anthony McCarten, who brought us The Theory Of Everything, topdrawer direction from Joe Wright, whose 2007 wartime drama, Atonement, comes repeatedly to mind, and a scene-stealing but exquisitely judged supporting performance from Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill.
It begins in May 1940 as the so-called ‘phoney war’ comes to an abrupt end with Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries. With an ailing and politically weakened Neville Chamberlain under relentless attack in the House of Commons, a new prime minister is urgently needed, and there is only one man who can bring all the feuding political parties together. But is the 65-year-old, hard-drinking, cigarchomping Churchill – variously dismissed as either an ‘actor in love with the sound of his own voice’ or a ‘drunkard’ by opponents – up to the job? And with the prospect of real war, can even he resist the siren call of appeasement? Might jaw-jaw – beginning peace negotiations with Hitler – be better than war-war? This is the film that gives us a Churchill who genuinely isn’t sure. Last year, in the not terribly successful film Churchill, which dealt with the run-up to D-Day, Brian Cox brought us a Churchill haunted by the mistakes of his past (the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli in 1915 that cost the lives of more than 50,000 Allied servicemen), exhausted by four years of war and outmanoeuvred and generally bullied by an unholy alliance of Dwight Eisenhower and General Montgomery. This
time around – with events taking place four years earlier, of course – Churchill’s frailties are centre stage again but far more convincingly so. He’s undermined by Chamberlain and Lord Halifax (played quite brilliantly by Stephen Dillane), struggles to strike up a rapport with the king and is haunted not just by Gallipoli (the prospect of losing virtually the entire British Army at Dunkirk is almost too much to bear) but by his own doubts as to the best way forward.
If he has a plan at all, it’s ‘to keep buggering on, not bugger it up’.
To some extent, Darkest Hour is a nearperfect companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. If you watched that aghast by both the apparent lack of a plan and the fact that nobody seemed to know what was going on, Wright’s film explains why. They were too busy arguing in the Cabinet War Rooms: there was no plan. Until the moment Churchill stiffened the sinew and finally got a grip.
There’s no doubt that Wright employs light, shade and cinematography to full dramatic effect, coming close to overdoing it at times. But his only real false step comes in a scene where the great man, who we have learnt by now has never been on a bus, suddenly descends to the London Underground to canvas opinion from the great British public. What? Cor blimey – it feels like a scene that’s been inserted especially for gullible Americans.
But it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of what eventually becomes a viscerally powerful film, or of Oldman’s at times electrifying performance.
This might just be his finest hour.