For the past twelve months or so I feel like I’ve
been stuck in something of a cinematic time warp. The events of May 1940
continue to draw me inexorably back. First there was Their Finest, then came Churchill, then came Dunkirk and finally, just when I thought
I was out they dragged me back in with Darkest
Hour. It’s been like a mini-Churchill franchise; and if you add in his
appearances on The Crown he’s becoming
ubiquitous.
This however has long been seen as the one to
beat. From its premiere at Toronto last year the general premise has been that
the Best Actor Oscar has been Gary Oldman’s to lose. Certainly there is much to
be said for Oldman’s performance, not least that he appears to emerge as a
character from behind a mountain of prosthetics. Sadly however this is a film
which for me was much less than the sum of its parts and never quite seemed
worthy of Oldman’s extraordinary efforts.
The film is set in May 1940 when Britain is in
turmoil. Our armies are being beaten in France and with Parliament in chaos a
new government of national unity is formed under Winston Churchill (Gary
Oldman). A controversial and maverick choice, Churchill can barely muster the support
of his own party far less the country. He is under pressure from his political
rival Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) who favours making some kind of peace deal
with Hitler. Churchill feels we should stand and fight but his entire army
faces being trapped and captured at Dunkirk. He has to make the biggest decision
of his political life and gamble with the lives of hundreds of thousands of
soldiers.
Essentially this is the build up to the ‘fight
them on the beaches’ speech but for me the film was nowhere near as gripping as
it ought to have been. Partly I think because this is the fourth time I’ve been
over this course in the past year; even if I didn’t know about the importance
of May 1940 beforehand, which I did, I’ve been pretty well schooled lately. The
fact that the audience for this film would have had to have been living in a
cave not to know about Dunkirk strips this story of much of its tension.
Instead we have to rely on Oldman’s performance
which is very fine indeed. He gives us the little character moments that bring Churchill
to life, not just the bombast and bluster of so many poor impressions. The
moments between Churchill and his family, especially with his wife Clementine
(Kristin Scott Thomas) ring true, and Ben Mendelsohn’s performance as King
George VI helps to give some sense of just how unpopular Churchill’s view was
in some quarters.
For all that it’s a curiously dispassionate film
which seems simply to be marking time until the big speech. Joe Wright’s tactic
of slamming the date on screen in massive letters to punctuate the time line also
fragments the film and actually highlights the lack of tension.
However the one scene that almost had me throwing
things at the screen was the moment when Churchill goes missing on his way to
deliver the big speech. He bunks off and takes the Tube where he sits among a
reverent, and unconvincingly diverse, group of passengers. This group of
extraordinarily articulate and well-read ‘commoners’ convince him that Britain
is worth fighting for so he goes to deliver the speech inspired by the honest
working men and women of London.
This is just so much tosh. I get that screenwriter
Anthony McCarten is trying for ‘a little
touch of Harry in the night’ as Henry V tours the camp on the night before
Agincourt but this is utter nonsense and demonstrably untrue.
For me this is a step too far, it goes beyond any
kind of artistic licence and, sadly, robs Oldman’s performance of much of his power.
In the end the speech, like the film, falls rather flat.
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