Darkest Hour (PG)
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Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) is first seen in Darkest Hour in bed having breakfast, a full “English,”
but the food is getting cold because he has a cigar to deal with, and a big glass of whisky too. He is dictating letters, answering telephone calls and bawling out his new secretary, Elizabeth Layton (Lily James.) He has barely been on screen for a moment but we are immediately given a sense of his childishness, his pomposity, his eccentricity, his way with words and his ability to juggle multiple tasks at once. The date is 10 May 1940 and he is on the verge of fulfilling his lifetime ambition and becoming Prime Minister. |
Oldman, who won a Golden Globe, is in phenomenal form as Churchill. He doesn’t underplay at all. There
wouldn’t be any point in that. He blusters and bellows, makes V signs, smokes cigars, and generally lives
up to everybody’s preconceptions about the man voted in a 2002 BBC poll as the “greatest Briton of all
time”.
This, though, is acting that moves well beyond caricature and bowler hat-wearing mannerism. Oldman’s
Churchill is devious, alcoholic and conceited, but also resilient and perceptive. He’s riven with guilt about
Gallipoli and also fretting about household expenses. (His wife can’t afford to pay the bills.)
Oldman’s great insight is that Churchill was giving a performance. “Be yourself,” his wife Clemmie (an
improbably glamorous Kristin Scott Thomas) tells him as he prepares to take office. “Which self should I
be today?” he replies. Oldman is a chameleon playing a chameleon.
Director Joe Wright takes the film’s title at face value and shoots it as if it is a film noir. Whether it’s the
House Of Commons, or Buckingham Palace, where Churchill is summoned by an untrusting King George
VI (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn in an altogether sterner way that he was by Colin Firth in
The King’s Speech) or the Cabinet War R This is a chamber piece but one done on an epic scale.
The backstairs intrigues here are putting the nation’s future at risk. Although the film opens with black and
white footage of massed forces of German tanks, soldiers and generals, the “villains” aren’t just Hitler and
Mussolini; in the two or three weeks in May that the story covers, Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and
Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), are Churchill’s main antagonists.
wouldn’t be any point in that. He blusters and bellows, makes V signs, smokes cigars, and generally lives
up to everybody’s preconceptions about the man voted in a 2002 BBC poll as the “greatest Briton of all
time”.
This, though, is acting that moves well beyond caricature and bowler hat-wearing mannerism. Oldman’s
Churchill is devious, alcoholic and conceited, but also resilient and perceptive. He’s riven with guilt about
Gallipoli and also fretting about household expenses. (His wife can’t afford to pay the bills.)
Oldman’s great insight is that Churchill was giving a performance. “Be yourself,” his wife Clemmie (an
improbably glamorous Kristin Scott Thomas) tells him as he prepares to take office. “Which self should I
be today?” he replies. Oldman is a chameleon playing a chameleon.
Director Joe Wright takes the film’s title at face value and shoots it as if it is a film noir. Whether it’s the
House Of Commons, or Buckingham Palace, where Churchill is summoned by an untrusting King George
VI (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn in an altogether sterner way that he was by Colin Firth in
The King’s Speech) or the Cabinet War R This is a chamber piece but one done on an epic scale.
The backstairs intrigues here are putting the nation’s future at risk. Although the film opens with black and
white footage of massed forces of German tanks, soldiers and generals, the “villains” aren’t just Hitler and
Mussolini; in the two or three weeks in May that the story covers, Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and
Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), are Churchill’s main antagonists.
Wednesday 4th July
Darkest Hour (PG)
Darkest Hour (PG)
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