Joe Wright (2017)
The first interesting thing about Darkest Hour is the BBFC certificate, which draws attention to mild bad language but nothing more. It’s not unusual for a certificate to warn about scenes of smoking and ‘threat’. Don’t cigars count as smoking – or is this a special exemption for Winston Churchill’s cigars? Isn’t the prospect of imminent Nazi invasion of Britain threatening? After this thought-provoking start, it’s a while before the film is interesting again. Darkest Hour dramatises events of May 1940, when Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and resisted attempts, led by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, to enter into peace negotiations with Germany. Joe Wright is quick to remind us that he is not an imaginative filmmaker and continues doing so for most of the next two hours.
Wright narrates by way of visual clichés. He favours vacuously spectacular God’s-eye-view shots (the House of Commons, the Cabinet War Rooms, British forces stuck at Dunkirk) and lone characters, usually Churchill (Gary Oldman), marching through dark tunnels towards camera. Debates in the bear garden of the Commons are a rhubarb-rhubarb cacophony, the sound ear-splittingly amplified. Later on, after Churchill’s phone conversation with a naval commander (David Bamber) about the requisitioning of boats for Dunkirk, Wright inserts a shot – just the one – of a few of the little ships bobbing cheerfully on the waves. As Churchill’s car makes its way towards Parliament, a journey that will culminate in his ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech, Wright goes for a slow-motion apotheosis of the view from the car window and the cross-section of London life it reveals: a rainy street with umbrellas held aloft, two little boys wearing Hitler masks, even a non-white person! (There’s another one on the London underground – more of that later.)
The film is anxious not to raise doubts in the audience’s minds that it’s anything but stirring and patriotic – and a reminder of the proximity in time of this darkest hour and ‘their finest hour’ in Britain’s World War II story. This anxiety has paid off: worldwide box-office takings have already nearly doubled the $30m budget. It’s a pity, even so. On the rare occasions that Dario Marianelli’s resoundingly predictable music shuts up and Joe Wright concentrates on what’s going on between two characters, Darkest Hour is genuinely involving. This happens in War Cabinet showdowns between Churchill and Halifax (Stephen Dillane), as well as in a conversation between the protagonist and King George VI (Ben Mendelssohn), when the latter, who has doubted that Churchill is the man to succeed Chamberlain, quietly but definitely confirms support for his new Prime Minister. It happens too in a prolonged, wordless exchange of looks between Churchill and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James).
The screenplay by Anthony McCarten, who did a good job on The Theory of Everything, is, for the most part, disappointingly crude, with plenty of clumsy exposition to get across how mistrusted Churchill was at the time, and why, especially within his own party. My historical knowledge isn’t enough for me to be sure whether McCarten and Wright have distorted facts to reinforce the story’s against-the-odds appeal, in particular the strength of opposition within the War Cabinet to Churchill’s defiance of calls to negotiate terms with Hitler. What’s certain is that the film includes ‘key’ sequences which, whether or not they’re based on actual events, ring deafeningly false. In the case of Elizabeth Layton’s brother who dies at Dunkirk, it doesn’t help that this virtually replicates a bit of Churchill earlier this year (a different Churchill secretary had a fiancé involved in the D-Day landings). The scene on a tube train, however, is something else.
Early in the film, Churchill announces (with annoying self-satisfaction) that he’s never travelled on the underground but Joe Wright’s slo-mo street vista prompts him to get out of his car and travel to Westminster by tube. In the train carriage, he talks with his starstruck fellow passengers and seeks their views on whether Britain should talk with Germany or hold firm and accept the grave consequences. They all decisively opt for a policy of never surrender. The passengers include, among others, a child, a mother with a babe in arms, a woman who shares a surname with Churchill’s mother, and a young black man, Marcus Peters (Ade Haastrup), and his white girlfriend. No one on the train bats an eyelid at this couple; nor does Churchill when, after he starts quoting Macaulay, Marcus joins in.
While it’s possible in retrospect to interpret Churchill’s notorious racism as an expression of imperialist zeal typical of the times in which he lived, the film’s picture of racial equality in 1940 London is offensively false. The longer this sequence went on (and a two-stop tube journey takes plenty of screen time), the more I wanted to look away. (The only consolation was to remember that ‘ordinary people’ like the ones Churchill is sharing a carriage with had the sense to vote Labour in 1945.) Perhaps what’s most remarkable about this gruesome episode is that it’s insulting to the hero too. Whatever one’s opinion of Churchill, it’s hard to deny that he had an extraordinary gift for language and, as a war leader, for expressing in memorable words sentiments that gave voice to what many others were feeling and hoping for. Why suggest instead that he cribbed the best bits of his script from vox pops?
You start off Sid Vicious and, if you keep going long enough, end up Winston Churchill. This performance will hardly be Gary Oldman’s last (he’s not quite sixty) but may prove to be his finest hour in terms of professional approbation. When Colin Firth came onstage to collect his Academy Award for The King’s Speech, his (amusing) first words were, ‘I’ve a feeling my career’s just peaked’. If Oldman emulates Firth’s Best Actor Oscar win it will, in one sense, be a boringly obvious choice (he’s been ante-post favourite for months) but it won’t, subject to what Daniel Day-Lewis serves up in Phantom Thread, be undeserved. A main reason for saying this is that Oldman is good in unexpected ways – another of the interesting things about Darkest Hour. The make-up team[1] has done a fine job but, even under prosthetic and padding, Oldman still lacks Churchill’s bulk and is lighter on his feet too – he moves at improbable speed. I liked this: it served almost as a symbol of the actor’s determination to be free of a traditional Churchill impersonation. There’s an easy familiarity in the scenes between Churchill and his wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas); you believe this is a marriage of long duration (thirty-two years in 1940 – with another twenty-five to go). Oldman gets across very well Churchill’s childishness, his appetite for compliments and, especially, a sense of drawing confidence from his own rhetorical flow; there are moments when you feel this is all that’s keeping him afloat in the sea of opposition he’s facing. Oldman achieves (more than did Brian Cox in Churchill or John Lithgow in The Crown) differences between Churchill’s oratorical and conversational speech patterns. Although the character is irascible, he rations extreme anger: as a result, the impact of the set-tos with Halifax across the cabinet table (which Oldman thumps) is terrific. I’ve never been a great Gary Oldman fan: I loathed his playing in The Dark Knight (2008) and didn’t think much of his George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). Watching Prick Up Your Ears (1987) again last summer, however, I saw things in Oldman’s portrait of Joe Orton that I’d missed at the first time of asking. His work in Darkest Hour is admirable.
Oldman gets some very good support, in spite of the fact that several characters in the story have become so familiar on screen in recent years that interpretations of them and the actors delivering them are starting to blur in one’s mind. Anthony Eden’s first words here are so halting that he seems to have a stammer: since Samuel West, who plays him, was George VI in Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), the effect is a little confusing. As the speech-challenged king, however, Ben Mendelssohn gives a distinctively sensitive and beautifully structured performance – painfully oppressed in his early scenes by the burden he’s having to shoulder but gradually and subtly developing into a man who knows his own mind, even if he’s always a little uncertain when he speaks it. Stephen Dillane’s deadly serious Halifax is a worthy (in dramatic terms) adversary for Churchill in the War Cabinet. As Chamberlain, Ronald Pickup strongly suggests declining powers both political and physical (Chamberlain died of cancer before the end of 1940.) She’s bland compared with Harriet Walter in The Crown and Miranda Richardson in Churchill but Kristin Scott Thomas isn’t objectionable as Clementine Churchill. Lily James plays Elizabeth Layton intelligently, though the part is weakly written. Joe Armstrong does well to give a bit of individuality to his role as some kind of political aide.
According to ITV news earlier this week, Churchill’s speeches in Darkest Hour are prompting applause in cinemas (but so did the opening number in La La Land). The mostly elderly audience at Curzon Richmond wasn’t demonstrative in that way but there were plenty of chuckles each time Churchill said something grumpy or rude and, in the later stages, snuffling noises. I found the climactic ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech unmoving – less moving anyway than in Dunkirk, surprising as that may seem. This was due partly to the integrity of Gary Oldman’s acting: even here there’s a wing-and-a-prayer quality to Churchill’s tour de force, in spite of his powerful delivery. It was due also to the tediously structured build-up to the speech – the street, the tube, meetings with the ‘Outer Cabinet’ and the War Cabinet before Churchill takes the floor of the House. I wish that Darkest Hour were less formulaic but there’s such a big audience that laps this up that it’s hard to blame the film-makers for pandering to it. I wondered what was going through the heads of viewers at Curzon Richmond in a scene illustrating tensions between George VI and Churchill. Did they feel at all uncomfortable about this clash of heroes or didn’t it matter, since they knew the pair would soon be confirmed as best mates? I don’t know the answer but the question is one more interesting thing about Darkest Hour.
16 January 2018
[1] David Malinowski, Ivana Primorac, Lucy Sibbick and Kazuhiro Tsuji, according to the BAFTA nominations.
