Films > Film Reviews

Darkest Hour

Cinema City

15/01/18

If Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk provided the gunfire, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour accompanies it with boardroom fury. Its centrepiece is Winston Churchill, newly promoted to the position of Prime Minister, and facing a world of war, furore and scepticism. The government is against him, the people are against him; essentially, the whole world is against him, and it’s his job to prove them wrong.

An oversimplification, sure, but fitting considering Darkest Hour is a gross oversimplification of Churchill’s wartime endeavours; it’s difficult to believe that a Dunkirk operation and an overturning of widespread scepticism was achieved by one person alone. There are supporting characters operating as players in this mission - such as Lily James’ secretary, or Ben Mendelsohn’s King George VI - but they are not ‘people’ so much as they are facilitators, each rotating around a fat-suited, cigar-smoking axis.

For Darkest Hour isn’t just a character study, but a vehicle for Gary Oldman’s performance, and a shameless one at that. Unfortunately, it’s a vehicle that barely possesses more than a chassis, or a vehicle where the wheels have fallen off long before the engine has petered out. Churchill’s there alright, but hardly any other character has the breathing space to be fleshed out as more than threadbare concepts. The actors seem more committed than the script. Lily James, for instance, is clearly the bridge between Prime Minister and the ‘common people’ (in what is the umpteenth use of Churchill’s secretary in a feature film), but we hardly get to know her as a person; if the bridge itself is unstable, then there’s difficulty found in crossing it.

Perhaps Darkest Hour’s greatest fault is that, despite focusing all the attention on Churchill and leaving his supporting cast in the wayside, we still don’t really get closer to understanding the man - or at least, what we don’t already know. He’s bumbling, brash, quick-witted, yada-yada... we’ve seen it all before. Oldman succumbs to a pastiche over the real figure, and if that truly is all there is to Churchill, then perhaps his story isn’t worth telling any more.

Not to dismiss Oldman - he’s very good in the role, but not so good as to suggest that doing away with the makeup and fat suit and enlisting an actor who just looks a bit more like Churchill wouldn’t have been beneficial. Here, he’s a wobbly sack of Oscar-gunning flab and sinew; there’s no meat to chew on, no bone to hold him in place. The film certainly attempts to characterise him beyond what we’re familiarised to, but it either doesn’t commit to this attempt - his doubts are fleeting and hardly do enough to stain the impression the mass population have of him as an unwavering British icon - or fatally misjudges how far they should take the characterisation: in one ghastly scene that takes place on the tube, Darkest Hour strives to Corbyn-ise the man, turning him into a ‘man of the people’ and doing away with his racial prejudices - which doesn’t so much as provide something we don’t know about him, but rather provides us with something that contradicts what we do know of him. It’s a bum-note the film never recovers from.

Problems don’t simply entrench themselves in Churchill’s character though - no, Joe Wright offers his input too. Wright’s direction is often the wrong direction, dismissing the emotional impact we should get from moments of horror. Bombs slam into muddy ground in sync to Darkest Hour’s scintillating score, before the picture transforms into the motionless face of a dead child - it’s visually impressive, but the reality is that World War II shouldn’t be this ‘cool’. Similarly, a zoom out from a soldier’s face to the planes above that spell their fate is misplaced, as if the film is stripping the scene of any gravitas and rendering it as an exciting set-piece to wake you up from potential boardroom tedium - a far cry from Wright’s beautiful, poetic one-take staging of Dunkirk in 2007’s Atonement. If the intention is to convey the sentiments towards the war from the perspective of the boardroom, then this needs to be made much more blatant; for now, it’s insensitive.

The direction works best when it puts Churchill up front and centre - shrouded by red light, or a silhouette boxed in darkness - this is evocative, visual storytelling at its finest, doing well to separate it from other more cagey (though just as worthy) biopics. And the thrums of piano or violin emanating from each interaction and confrontation evokes the urgency Wright goes for; similarly, the dialogue is zippy, if not nuanced.

Sadly, Churchill’s clammy hands are all over this biopic, yet he leaves few fingerprints to offer insight; not only does Darkest Hour not balance its cast right, it doesn’t even get its central figure right, instead offering a serviceable retelling and simplifying of an event that could have been told in a much more sophisticated manner. Oldman may wield his Best Actor Oscar by the time this film has finished its awards run, but one would have hoped that a Joe Wright film would have functioned regardless of Oldman, rather than facilitating him. Those that call Darkest Hour a perfect companion piece to Nolan’s Dunkirk are right: watch these two films together to remind you how great Dunkirk is.

4/10