Darkest Hour ** (2017, Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas, Stephen Dillane) – Movie Review

Gary Oldman won the Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta as Best Actor for Darkest Hour.

For playing British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill in director Joe Wright’s 2017 movie Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman won the Oscar as Best Actor, Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama and Bafta for Best Leading Actor. And there was a second Oscar for the Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling (Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski and Lucy Sibbick) that transforms him.

Darkest Hour proves a super-sized showcase for Oldman’s grandstanding turn as Churchill under acres of prosthetic make-up. It is a fun turn, but a turn it is, quite fussy and showy. Despite all the make-up which makes Oldman look unrecognisable as Oldman, it doesn’t make him look like Churchill either. If you take away the props of the hat, cigar and fat stomach, you wouldn’t know it was supposed to be Churchill. Vocally, too, he sounds little like one of the most imitable voices in history. But, again, it is a fun, showy turn that attracts attention.

Wright’s film seems small, cramped and talky, a smooth-running but low-budget effort. When we get to Dunkirk, it is a brief scene of toy boats on what looks like somebody’s bath tub. Then we remember that huge big-budget movie of Dunkirk this year, where the whole darn thing was re-staged by Christopher Nolan at enormous cost. Then again, this past year there was Churchill, with Brian Cox. And Timothy Spall has of course already given us his Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech (2010). We are kind of a bit Churchilled out really. And royalled out too.

Darkest Hour tells a very similar story to Churchill in a very similar, talky, slightly hammy and artificial way. It is kind of TV drama. Darkest Hour makes sure it contacts the current vogue for, obsession for, royalty in movies, by making King George VI the other major figure in the film. He is played with great right royal stiffness by Ben Mendelsohn, This is a turn too, perhaps inevitably, but quite a good one from the Melbourne, Australia, born Mendelsohn. He makes you warm, a least a bit, to George VI. 

Churchill is a very difficult character to play, because on the one hand he is a difficult, stubborn, obstinate, none too charismatic, cigar-chomping man and on the other hand actors, writers and films want to bring out the warm, human, loveable side of him. Oldman definitely goes for loveable with his portrait of Churchill along his path to the famous speech in the Commons that finishes the movie – ‘ we will fight them on the beaches’ etc etc. Isn’t it Churchill’s toughness and resolve that makes him remarkable, not his warm, human, loveability?

This film has the same sub-pot as the Brian Cox version of Churchill improbably melting and becoming kindly to a female assistant (Lily James as Elizabeth Layton) he’s been typically horrible to, and also another melting and becoming kindly to the neglected wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas). If you’ve seen Churchill, all this is very deja vu, and it was better done in the Brian Cox version. What is new here is the stuff with peace-mongering Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) opposing Churchill as a war-mongering madman. Halifax is portrayed as trying to sell Britain down the river at its Darkest Hour by making a pact with the evil Europeans of Germany and Italy.

Anthony McCarten’s script also has Churchill dithering at the last minute over whether he should go for a deal with the Italians to broker a peace pact with the monster Hitler or sacrifice countless British lives to fight the Nazis back when they were at the very gates of the citadel. All they had to do was keep going across the Channel. McCarten tries to sprinkle in a bit of misjudged humour to the screenplay. Hasn’t he read his title? It’s Darkest Hour not Darkest Hour with a Few Minutes of Humour.

In a rather risible development, Churchill abandons his chauffeur-driven care and takes the Tube – for the first time in his life – to Westminster, and has an impromtu referendum with the astonished fellow passengers in his carriage. Do the locals fancy fighting or giving in? Ah, they fancy fighting to the death. Churchill says ta, and nips off to the Commons and delivers his speech. Trust the people, the King has told him, tell them the truth about our dire situation and you will know what to do.

Thus the film makes an effort to be relevant, in its pro-Brexit stance. Well that does help to keep it away from just being a museum piece of heritage cinema. Nevertheless, enough already! No more films about Churchill, please! No more films about the war! No more films about the royals! Let’s move on. Be new, be modern, be forward thinking, look to the future not the past.

Anyway, for all its faults, Darkest Hour provides plenty of food for thought apparently.

Though he played Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, Drexl in True Romance, and George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and starred in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the remake of RoboCop, this is Oldman’s first Golden Globe nomination.

Suffering for his art, Oldman smoked $20,000 worth of cigars while filming Darkest Hour. He says he got serious nicotine poisoning by smoking 400 cigars during shooting. Holy smoke!

Brian Cox already played Winston Churchill this year in Churchill.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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