Sound familiar? Perhaps it would, right up to the revelation that this is a story about a world leader ultimately vindicated by history as "the man who saved the 20th century."
I do not mean to suggest that director Joe Wright intends Darkest Hour, which focuses on the behind-the-scenes drama in the historically pivotal weeks after Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, to be a subversive analogue for our own Age of Trump. I'm certain he did not, but perhaps it would be better if he had. The film he made instead is, to be sure, impeccably crafted and expertly delivered. But for a story all about courage under fire, it plays it far too safe to offer any real surprise.
Least surprising of all is the film's ultimate ambition — to deliver on a silver platter an Academy Award for one of the greatest and most criminally underrated actors of his generation. As Churchill, Gary Oldman delivers more than just an expert impression or collection of studied tics, though his performance does offer plenty of those, as well. Utterly unrecognizable beneath a mountain of prosthetic makeup (prepared by Kazuhiro Tsuji, who should be in line for some serious Oscar consideration himself) Oldman manages to find humanity in what would otherwise read as straight hagiography.
That humanity is evident in the delirious cackle he lets out when Churchill's personal secretary, played by Downton Abbey's Lily James, informs him that he had given the "V for Victory" hand sign in a way that, on the London street, actually means "up your bum." You can hear it in his voice in a wrenching scene when Churchill, just informed that Belgium and Holland have fallen and that the invasion of France is imminent, reaches out to Franklin Roosevelt, whose hands have been tied by an isolationist Congress, to beg for any help that he can give. And you can see it in the utter depression that consumes him — the "black dog" of which Churchill often spoke — as he sits alone in a darkened room and ponders whether he has any choice but surrender.
Darkest Hour has its brightest moments in those scenes where Oldman gets the chance to sink his teeth deeply into this potentially career-defining role. Alas, even as director of photography Bruno Delbonnel offers one immaculately constructed shot after another — the interplay of shadows and natural light in the House of Commons, ominous fog swallowing a hangar, dizzying crane shots through swirling staircases and a bomb's eye view of the trenches at Calais — Wright struggles to stitch them together in a way that would allow the drama to truly reflect the stakes.
It likely doesn't help that we never really see the German threat in the flesh. In place of Hitler, the antagonists Darkest Hour offers are the former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) and his presumed political heir, Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane). Given that we all know how the history played out, and that both men ended up on the wrong side of it, Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten could have taken this opportunity to flesh out these figures in three dimensions, demonstrating how "appeasement" was, in context, a rational response to overwhelmingly negative odds. It hints in that direction in its portrait of Chamberlain, toward whom the film is arguably more sympathetic than most treatments. But Halifax is drawn as cartoonishly venal, sniveling and duplicitous, seemingly more concerned with executing a play for power than in the Nazi threat just across the channel.
After a starchy — and at times, frankly, dull — first two acts, the film's momentum does pick up in the third, though it comes at the expense of any sort of historical verisimilitude. The pivotal scene sees Churchill slip away from his driver to take a ride on the London Underground and hear directly from salt of the earth Londoners what they think he should do. It's the most cloying and mawkish scene in the film and yet, dramatically, the ending would almost certainly have fallen flat without it.
Spoiler alert: the bad guys lost.
This article appears in Dec 28, 2017 – Jan 4, 2018.