Even in the darkest hour, an impeccably dressed set: Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) prepares to kiss the hand of George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) upon his appointment as Prime Minister.
Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part – one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties – and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch. Gary Oldman’s is stylistically both a nimbler and more shambolic Churchill – boozy and blustery and blubbery, immensely secure and oddly disconnected. It is a dazzling performance of the indispensable man of the century, intelligent and insightful, yet one that caused me, by the end, a grave unease.
Churchill tends to the Churchillian, which is to say the epic. Darkest Hour, by contrast, is very finely focused. Joe Wright, director, and Edward McCarten, writer, confine their two dark hours of screen time to a couple of critical weeks in May 1940, when Hitler’s invasion of Norway precipitated Neville Chamberlain’s retreat from Downing Street. Aside from some rather elaborately choreographed overhead shots and a lush grandiose score, Darkest Hour is filmed claustrophobically – in poky sitting rooms, Downing Street basements, attics, Westminster ante-rooms, and chilly lavatories; the lighting is crepuscular. The fate of the world is being determined, but we never glimpse the far horizons, only the dingy backrooms.
What happened that month was a showdown between the two principal contenders for the Prime Ministership, Mr Churchill and Lord Halifax. Stephen Dillane is excellent as Halifax, the vulpine cadaver looking down (in every sense) from the Commons gallery at Churchill’s turns at the dispatch box. Unfortunately, aside from skillful deployments of his inscrutable yet condescending eyebrows, he gets somewhat short shrift on screen, so as a Churchill vs Halifax cage match it never quite comes off – presumably because the third Viscount Halifax is entirely unknown in Hollywood, and thus a tricky pitch. (“Third Viscount Halifax? Hey, let’s see what the first two gross before we commit to that…”)
This is a pity, because the two men were on opposite ends of the seesaw, and, capacious as Churchill’s bottom is, most of the other players – the King, Chamberlain, the parliamentary party, defeatist generals, Dominion prime ministers around the globe – were inclined to park their own butts down Halifax’s end. On May 10th, the day Winston became PM, the Germans invaded Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Ten days later, Hitler’s army reached the Channel, and was within reach of throttling the 300,000-strong British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and seizing the entire French fleet. In that dreadful month of May, Churchill wanted to fight on; Halifax preferred to use Mussolini’s “good offices” to sue for a “peace” that would leave Britain and its empire more or less “intact” – save for East Africa, Suez, Malta, Gibraltar and sundry other places that would have to be addressed, per the Italian ambassador in London, “as part of a general European settlement”.
