Review: Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour (PG)

UK 2017 125 mins Dir: Joe Wright Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup

Rather like last year’s Jackie, Joe Wright’s “Cometh the hour…” drama is built around one huge, compelling, Oscar-baity performance. Probably the only actor able to play both Sid Vicious and Winston Churchill, Gary Oldman certainly gives his all in the lead role and could finally bag the big gong he so richly deserves. The film? That’s less great. Screenwriter Anthony McCarten deploys some clunky narrative devices, completely invents one of the big crowd-pleasing scenes, and winds up seeming to suggest that WWII was won by oratory alone. On the plus side, there’s plenty of unexpected humour and the film is particularly good at underlining Churchill’s self-doubt and unpopularity among the scheming appeasers in his own cabinet.

Darkest Hour opens with the resignation of Chamberlain (Pickup) and the reluctant realisation that Churchill is the only real candidate for the top job. Nobody thinks he’s up to it. Still living in the shadow of the Gallipoli disaster, he’s viewed by many honourable members as an ego-driven lightweight (“I wouldn’t let him borrow my bicycle,” sniffs one) whose record is “a litany of catastrophe”. Even stuttering old Bertie (Mendelsohn) views him with disdain. Meanwhile, western civilisation is on the verge of collapse as the Nazis drive on towards Dunkirk…

Oldman’s Churchill goes beyond the usual caricature or impersonation to give us a witty, wily, self-aware, mostly sozzled old growler who wakes to Scotch and sausages, laments not gaining power when he was a younger man, and leads a toast to “not buggering it up”. Kristin Scott Thomas does her usual brittle, cut-glass RP turn – with the mandatory sly wink of feminism – as his supportive, long-suffering spouse Clemmie. And in one of the film’s cheesier plot devices, Churchill is equipped with a nervous young secretary (James), whom he first reduces to tears and later – surprise! – dotes upon as she becomes the recipient of his exposition.

One could probably build up a patchwork from all the overlapping with other recent movies: Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill, The King’s Speech, Hyde Park on Hudson (Churchill gets a phone call to an unhelpful FDR here) and, most obviously, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, to which Darkest Hour acts as a companion piece. No shots are fired and the few cutaways to battle are filmed mostly from the air, distancing us from the grisly reality of war in a complete inversion of Nolan’s approach. Instead, the politicking unfolds in airless, windowless, smoke-filled (mostly from Winnie’s ever-present cigar) cabinet war rooms. In keeping with the title, Wright doesn’t shy away from the darker stuff, such as Churchill’s decision to sacrifice several thousand men at Calais in the hope of saving a greater number at Dunkirk. And it’s sobering to be reminded of how close he came to capitulating to the appeasers, chiefly Stephen Dillane’s eminently hissable Lord Halifax. Since we never see Hitler, except in newsreel footage, the dastardly Foreign Secretary emerges as the film’s most malevolent figure.

There is, however, one big mis-step. At his lowest ebb, Winnie is shown going AWOL to navigate the London Underground with the forelock-tugging lower orders, each and every one of whom assures him that he’s doing the right thing. Emboldened, he subsequently quotes them by name in parliament, like a 1940s Jeremy Corbyn. None of this actually happened and it feels like a wholly unnecessary dramatic contrivance.