by Jason Solomons
Gary Oldman’s performance as Winston Churchill is one of the great actor stories. It’s such unlikely casting, yet by the end of joe Wright’s ripe and enjoyable film, you’re totally convinced. Oldman dominates Darkest Hour rather in the way that the figure of Churchill towers over the mythology of the modern British psyche.
Heavily disguised in prosthetics and armed with all the tools of an impressionist – cigar, jowls, drink, slobbery voice – Oldman nevertheless delivers a Churchill brimming with fresh insights, twinkling with mischief and bristling with determination.
Director Wright sets about the story like a ticking-clock thriller, set over Winston’s first few weeks in office in May 1940 and building up to Dunkirk and the battle to finally banish any continued moves for appeasement.
For me, it recalls the way aaron Sorkin used to do an episode of The West Wing, with lots of sharp, shadowy discussions leading up to the big reveal speech, the big moment. as such, the film clips along, dipping into the personal and reflecting it onto the wider stage of the politics.
To that end, Kristin Scott Thomas is an able foil, her Clemmie proving an inspiration and a corrective – Kristin’s an expert at the rolling eyes and the pinched compliment, but this was the first time I’d ever really got a sense of Churchill as some kind of family man and father, even though these were hardly his strengths.
While war ramps up in the background, there’s mostly a lot of politics here, as Churchill wrestles with how to get his decisions through the layers of obstruction, mostly in the form of his own party, who seem still in thrall to neville Chamberlain (ronald Pickup) and Lord Halifax (a wonderful, squirmy performance from Stephen Dillane, who sort of effaces this man from history even as we watch).
With the raucous scenes in the House of Commons, Wright unleashes his flair for theatricality and composition, but it’s in the bunkers of the War rooms, though, that this film is won, and it’s where Oldman injects his charisma, casting about his light and shade with relish.
It’s quite the portrait, this film. The images frame Winston the way a perceptive painter might – not wholly flattering but fascinated with the bumps and flaws. It’s like a Lucian Freud, mostly, but occasionally pierced by a darker shaft of Bacon. We see the breakfast in bed, the blustery eccentricities, the whisky and soda. But we also get the hairdryer treatment of his rhetoric, ‘sending the English language into battle’, as anthony McCarten’s script would have it.
Doing Churchill is a bit like playing Hamlet. The ‘fight on the beaches’ speech looms like ‘To be or not to be’, and watching Oldman build up to it is an actorly treat. By the time we get there, we’ve seen under the layers of that make-up, seen him giggling at getting his V-sign the wrong way around, bellowing about single-space typing, dictating from the bath.
It’s hammy, yes, but that’s by expediency: Oldman, Wright and Winston, they know you need a bit of bluster and showbiz to pull this off, so it’s fitting that both the star actor and the character he’s playing are consciously constructing an image, arming themselves with a war chest of tricks to triumph. and triumph they most certainly do.
