In the spring of 1940, Western civilization was in retreat across Europe as Adolf Hitler’s armies pushed north and west, overrunning Scandinavia and the Low Countries, driving across France and trapping the defeated British army on the coast at Dunkirk. Odds were that Britain would sue for peace but the oddsmakers weren’t counting on Winston Churchill, barking and snapping at his chain like an enraged bulldog guarding his island home.
Darkest Hour is the latest in a string of recent films by young British directors that take measure of their grand and great grandparents during a time when their actions held the world in the balance. Darkest Hour is a necessary companion to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk for showing the chain of decisions that resulted in history’s greatest evacuation. Unlike Nolan, Darkest Hour’s director, Joe Wright, breaks no cinematic ground and tells the story in old-fashioned, heart-swelling terms.
And yet, Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten complicate the oft-told story of British heroism in the face of Hitler. Darkest Hour indicts the pessimism of a ruling class willing to cut a deal rather than continue fighting. Churchill is shown as often delusional, usually intoxicated (by alcohol as much as his own words) and occasionally befuddled like a man about to have a stroke. But in his resolute refusal to acknowledge the scale of Europe’s catastrophe and recognize defeat, he set in motion the wheels that would crush the Nazis five years on.
Superb in his role as the jowly old warrior, Gary Oldman’s Churchill swallows his vowels in slurry speech, scowls like the wrath of God and fulminates in outbursts of rage against the stupidity and cowardice before him. Churchill was thrust into the prime minister’s office against the wishes of his own party, the Conservatives. With his exuberant idiosyncrasies, he was always an uncomfortable benchmate with his Tory colleagues who distrusted his rogue brilliance. Churchill came to power at the behest of the Labour Party, whose leaders despised Churchill’s predecessor, the Conservative appeaser Neville Chamberlain. Britain resorted to him rather than embraced him.
In Darkest Hour, Churchill, for whom politics was war by other means, barely survives the machinations of the Tories who want him out. He almost loses heart. Despairing, he begins to ponder surrender until George VI, the stuttering diffident monarch, urges him to carry on, and a spontaneous ride on the London Underground buoys his confidence in a country whose everyday citizens he had scarcely ever met.
While Oldman dominates every scene, he receives solid support from veteran British actress Kristin Scott Thomas as Churchill’s wife, Clementine, a no-nonsense patrician who keeps her husband’s feet to the fire, and “Downton Abbey’s” Lily James as his secretary, tasked with transcribing Churchill’s eloquent mumbling into the ringing flights of speech for which he is remembered.
Where Nolan’s Dunkirk visualizes the power of masses of people to work together toward good ends, Darkest Hour tells the story’s other half by illustrating the power of a single person to change history. If not for Churchill, Hitler might have won, verstehen Sie?
