Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour 2017 U.K. (125 minutes) directed by Joe Wright; written by Anthony McCarten; director of photography, Bruno Delbonnel; casting by Jina Jay.

Gary Oldman brings Winston Churchill to life via Churchill’s language, the central ‘character’ in Darkest Hour, with the support of an outstanding cast working with a great script, but the film’s direction and lighting leave much to be desired.

 The ‘darkest hour’ came in 1940 at that moment in history when Nazi Germany appeared poised to conquer the European continent and threaten the British Isles, despite desperate diplomatic moves by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and others to avoid a second ruinous world war. Darker yet in some circles was the prospect and necessity of replacing Chamberlain with Churchill, an aristocratic speechifying senior politician right about Adolf Hitler, but wrong in a trail of policy decisions going back to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in the First World War.

Oldman earned his Best Actor Academy Award for Darkest Hour in a role tough not to caricature. He seems to have learned a thing or two from George Smiley. We have not seen a better movie Winston Churchill, and many lesser bluff mimics. Oldman and the cast’s acting stands out because they made an ensemble piece around Churchill’s language: the script is written to Churchill’s language in that it is structured to his speeches; the subsidiary roles support it; the movie even closes with a direct reference to it. 

Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s typist-midwife,

However, apart from the stellar writing, casting and acting, the movie is a bad job. The subject needed something quieter and less Crowded With Import, such as the way Tom Hooper handled The King’s Speech (2010), an equally large—and contemporary—tale. Darkest Hour tells a tremendous story and, as in The King’s Speech, these actors, from Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas as Clementine Churchill, to Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s typist-midwife, through the entire cast, had the chops to carry it. Susanna White’s excellent Parade’s End (2012) also comes to mind.


Kristin Scott-Thomas as Clementine Churchill, with Winston

The most glaring problem is the lighting. It is entirely too white. We thought first that Oldman should have been made up a touch pinker: Churchill was ruddy by nature and drank habitually, yet for the most part looks an awfully pasty white in the film. On a rewatch, it is the lighting that pales him. These actors would have looked marvelous in a softer and more nuanced light. The other part of this is that there is nearly no chiaroscuro: the actors either were blasted by unfiltered beams, or barely visible in the gloaming. The lighting also artificially ‘dates’ the colours, antiquing them to make them look like colours retouched in photographs before this historical period, closer to the turn of the 20th century.

Beyond this, the music booms and the framing of the picture looks overwrought and televisiony, making it ring phony and pretentious. This is entirely unnecessary. There are several choreographed slow-motion ‘person’-in-the-street floatersby scenes in which urban pedestrians and workers pass before the viewer (Churchill, being driven round London) a lot more slowly than one should expect to see them from a moving automobile, even in London traffic. These may have been someone’s idea of ‘art’; it read like an advertisement. And when Churchill takes the London Underground to work for the first time in his life to engage with everyday Britons, the preponderance of women and a young black man as his fellow passengers, though possibly historical, seemed a note strained to exhibit a gratuitous multi-culti bona fide. This kind of ‘artistic’ fiddling distracts from rather than enhances the story.


How the other 99% lives: Churchill rides the Tube to work.

These infelicities aside, this movie is worth seeing because the cast bonds and makes the script sing as they tell the tale.