Darkest Hour
Directed by Joe Wright
Written by Antony McCarten
Music by Dario Marianelli
CAST
Gary Oldman – Winston Churchill
Kristin Scott-Thomas – Clemmie Churchill
Ben Mendelsohn – King George VI
Lily James – Elizabeth Layton
Ronald Pickup- Neville Chamberlain
Stephen Dillane – Viscount Halifax
Samuel West – Sir Anthony Eden
David Schofield – Clement Atlee
Gary Oldman as Churchill, Lily James as his secretary
It really is something to do with Brexit.
2017 saw Dunkirk, Their Finest, Churchill, Allied, The Secret Scripture in the cinema, and SS.GB and Halycon on TV and 2018 kicks off with Darkest Hour. We went through the 52 episodes of the 1970s series A Family At War too. The British obsession with World War II continues unabated, and the focus is very much on Britain alone against the rest of Europe. Is it reflecting a public mood, leading a public mood or objecting to a public mood?
Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill
Last year’s film Churchill saw Brian Cox take on the role of the great man in and around the D-Day Landings. This year’s Darkest Hour has Gary Oldman essaying him around the Dunkirk evacuation. I really disliked Churchill, intensely so, making it my “Worst of The Year” in my Best of 2017- Screen list. That means the worst of a major serious film worth seeing in the cinema. My Sky subscription has shown me there are far, far worse on release, even to the depths of The Ottoman Lieutenant which we saw last night. So apologies to Churchill … it wasn’t that bad.
Churchill on the wireless
There are many parallels between Darkest Hour and Churchill. Both rely on long close ups of Winston and his bad temper and thought processes. The relationship with his wife Clemmie, and the poor young female secretary who has to take his dictation are the key interest in both. In both, the young secretary has a photo of a bloke caught up in the battle in France – a boyfriend in Churchill, a brother in Darkest Hour. Both cause the Prime Minister to express sympathy. Both are trite. In Churchill, he has to confront Eisenhower and Montgomery; in Darkest Hour he has to confront ousted Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and would-be Prime Minister Viscount Halifax. Darkest Hour is easily the better film, Joe Wright directed three of my favourite 21st Century films, Atonement, Hanna and Anna Karenina for starters. However, Darkest Hour is not for me a contender in the film or director category in this year’s awards season.
Gary Oldman’s transformation into Churchill is an extraordinary feat (200 hours in make up overall), certainly worthy of a nomination.
Lily James as Elizabeth Layton
Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, the young secretary, might stand a chance as best actress in a supporting role, though as a lead actress she doesn’t hold a candle to Frances McDormand’s role in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. That might be my problem … both films had their UK release on the same day, and we saw Three Billboards yesterday, and Darkest Hour today. Against the wild invention of Martin McDonagh’s film, Darkest Hour comes across as rather a lot of ranting, and is pedestrian in comparison. It’s actually two darkest hours … it’s all very dark and murky.
Ronald Pickup as Neville Chamberlain
It’s May 1940. Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) is forced to resign, and the opposition led by Clement Atlee, i.e. Labour and Liberal, will only join a coalition government if arch-appeaser Chamberlain goes. The Tory grandees want Viscount Halifax, as much of an appeaser as Chamberlain. Halifax declines, knowing he can’t swing the Labour / Liberal MPs behind him. (In reality Atlee was willing to serve under Halifax). It will be Winston Churchill.
BenN Mendelsohn as King George VI
Churchill’s record of rashness … the disastrous Gallipoli landings of 1916, attacking the striking miners in South Wales in the General Strike etc, are against him. King George VI doesn’t want him either. Throughout the tense May 1940 defeats in France the battle is between those who want a negotiated peace (via Mussolini) and those who want to stand and fight. We are in London, often underground in the war offices. In the end, Churchill takes a straw poll of popular opinion in a tube train, then appeals directly to backbench MPs who support him. In the final scene (We will fight them on the beaches … speech to Parliament) Labour and Liberal greet his speech ecstatically. His own party sit on their hands until Chamberlain signals them. Fascinating. Was it true? Certainly that’s how the British people perceived it in the 1945 election, where support for Churchill as a war leader was outweighed by the wish for change, and rejection of the Conservative party. Well, Churchill didn’t trust his own party either. I thought the Labour / Liberal support was overdone to make a point. Churchill in the film, as in life, described Atlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” I’ll quote my comment in Churchill:
As a kid, my Great Uncle Ben drilled me in how Churchill turned cavalry against striking Welsh miners in 1926. Ben was there. My dad hugely admired Churchill. My Welsh mum did not. At university, a friend’s Scottish miner dad told me that in the mining areas, people booed Churchill on the radio even in the war. Norman Mailer nailed the point in The Naked and The Dead which was set in the Pacific campaign. The only way to beat evil and ruthless enemies is to appoint a stronger, more ruthless leader on your own side, then get rid of him the minute the war’s over. As we did in the 1945 election.
Churchill (Gary Oldman) addresses backbench MPs
So no, I don’t believe the Labour MPs from mining areas were so overwhelmingly keen on Churchill, as they are in the film. The film is making a point. I don’t know if Churchill actually said it, but in his speech to backbenchers he says that the landowners might retreat to their stately piles while a swastika flew over Buckingham Palace. If he said it, he underestimated the Nazis penchant for looting artworks. He also invokes the spectre of British fascist Oswald Moseley. Whatever, the Labour / Liberal side come across as the more patriotic. Churchill was wary of peers as a group, in spite of being descended from the Duke of Marlborough. In 1955 he was offered a dukedom … ex-Prime Ministers normally got a lesser earldom. He was the only non-royal offered a dukedom after 1900, and the title Duke of London was proposed. He declined it, because he wanted to stay in the House of Commons, but also he saw himself as a great “commoner” and to be fair no title would add to the fact of being simply “Winston Churchill.”
The key sequence is when Churchill decides to seek the opinion of “The people” by taking a tube train one stop along the District line to Westminster. An awful lot happens in one stop on the line, and it’s nicely 2018 PC in having an Afro-Caribbean character being especially supportive. Joe Wright admits that’s fiction, to show “an emotional truth.” He adds that Churchill did go off on his own at times. For me, the cheerful lovable Londoners were all a bit too sentimentally loyal and brave. The trouble is, when a film purports to show historical facts and events, and a major part screams out as obviously fictional, it undermines belief in the rest.
In the end, we know Churchill was right. Period. That was before we even found the full horror of what the Nazis had done. The film brings that out by relying on our knowledge of subsequent events. In Britain, that works.
OK, let’s see Lily James again
Our mood is often led by the extraordinarily beautiful Lily James’ reactions. She’s so good that it almost leads one to give the film an extra star, but then she’s so good in Cinderella, Baby Driver and when we saw her on stage, in Branagh’s Romeo & Juliet. But you can’t judge the film just because Oldman is a great actor, and every smallest breath or muscle twitch by Lily James is entrancing.
The last moment of the film has Halifax stating that “Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle”. It works here, but Halifax wasn’t the one who said it, and the well-known quote comes from Edward R. Murrow who said it in 1954. John F. Kennedy repeated it in 1963, when Churchill received honorary American citizenship.
The music by Dario Marianelli is worth a nomination, It throbs throughout, rising and falling, matched by brilliant sound effects, so that the underground scenes are wheezing, throbbing pipes and air conditioners.
What is really poor … extraordinarily poor for nowadays, dire … are the attempts to show planes flying and bombing the ground in France. OK., it’s stylized, but it really does look like Airfix model planes … well, not as detailed as Airfix or Revell really … and painted splashes of light. Dire visual effects, although there is very little action in the film. If you can’t afford decent effects, then archive black and white footage is way better. After all, quite a bit of B&W archive footage is used elsewhere in the film to show German troops and tanks. The budget got blown on hundreds of extras dressed up as MPs perhaps.
When Churchill flies to France to try to stiffen French resistance, it’s highly stylized with him looking through the plane window at people about twenty feet below him. It’s a pity Joe Wright couldn’t have clipped in some of his own superb Dunkirk beach scenes from Atonement. The slow motion scenes of people in London streets are excellent though, and reminded me of Anna Karenina.
Overall, rather dull, and the subject matter should not be. Too involved with the politics.
***
TRIVIA
Oh, dear. I’m a plane spotter. In the film, Churchill flies to France in an American-made DC3 Dakota (or C47 in military guise). I knew the RAF weren’t getting US planes at that time, as mentioned in Churchill’s futile appeal by phone to Roosevelt in this film. I checked online. He flew in a De Haviland DH-95 Flamingo on his several flights in May 1940. I wouldn’t have known that. I’m sure none survive and DC3s do, but the important point is that it was an American plane. Wrong.
kyonggimike said:
There’s some clunky expository dialogue. Winston and Clemmie exchange facts about their early life which they both would hardly have needed reminding of, and Atlee says something like “We in the opposition Labour Party …” And did people “ride” the Underground in 1940? When Johnny Cash’s LP Ride This Train came out in about 1960, that collocation was new to me.
Another thing. I was in a hurry to see the film this evening since it’s only showing in a few cinemas here in Korea, and only scheduled to run for a couple of days in most of them. I thought it was a shame that Koreans are going to miss a chance to discover the origin of their universal and almost obligatory photo pose.
LikeLike