Darkest Hour: A Poignant, Powerful Biography

Perhaps it's hypocritical for a movie critic like me to look at the culture he lives in and call it cynical. My hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that today, we are endlessly inundated with think pieces about why someone we take for granted as a hero is actually the villain of their story. Arguments like these aren't limited to the hero-villain framework, either. Though his arguments were horrendously eisegetical, I once read an article in which a journalist tried to frame the Joker from The Dark Knight as a racist. If you ask me, that's just a waste of a perfectly good internet provider payment, and even though Darkest Hour isn't the most complex drama of all time, it is also refreshingly free of the judgmental snobbery pervading so many modern biographies. It is content to live among people from the past while also giving them the benefit of the doubt. 

Darkest Hour isn't unlike other dramas you'll watch about famous historical figures. The unfavorable stakes, the melancholy music, the text-heavy exposition drops at the movie's beginning and/or end; they're all there. The strengths of this movie lie entirely in its execution, and the ruthless efficiency of its editing elevates it to its best when combined with Gary Oldman's forceful on-screen personality. Being about as British as you can get, this movie is very often an exercise in style, but it doesn't feel like an empty exercise. This style serves only to underscore the urgency and impossibility of Churchill's situation and enhance the already outstanding performance of the man portraying him. He was one man daring to look a fascist war machine in the eyes and not blink, and this movie does his somehow amicable intensity justice.

Before we are even introduced to Churchill, we're regaled with stories of his various oddities, and Oldman does the Old Bulldog justice. He's an eccentric fellow who talks with a nasally quality, as though he has tissues shoved up his nose, and we're left to wonder how someone like him could possibly take Britain by the hand and guide it through a war on this scale. This movie rides entirely on Oldman's performance, which is an utterly transformative portrayal and a mess in the best way possible. It is toweringly brilliant, an irresistible and quirky onslaught of eccentricity. He doesn't just play Churchill. He becomes him. No matter where your opinion on this film falls, few will deny that this is one of the most eccentric, outstanding, and unrecognizable performances in recent memory; Oldman’s cadence is a revelation. His range of inflection is remarkable, and yet he still sounds and behaves unlike anyone you've ever heard of or met before.

Nevertheless, I will say that the strengths of this movie lie more in its execution than in its depth. Churchill, though I don't believe him to be the hidden villain that so many revisionist historians paint him as, isn't allowed to lay his darker sides bare in this movie. Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize it for what it doesn't try to do, but Churchill isn't given the complexity he possessed in real life here. One can't help but wonder what sort of movie this would have been had it delved deeper into the real man. It's a relatively small issue when you consider what the movie accomplishes, but a little difficult to ignore.

Much of Darkest Hour excels due to its execution, which, aside from some production design obviously built on soundstages, is sublime. The editing of this movie is amazing, dropping exposition intelligently and naturally whilst also cutting quickly between the various chaotic corners of Churchill’s life, all of which lend a loud importance to his efforts to keep Britain afloat under the onslaught of The Blitz. The clicking of those keys is practically deafening, like punctuation to that eccentric personality of his that we catch glimpses of in his speeches. Dario Marianelli and Vikingur Olafsson's score is just as overwhelming in all the right ways. Some will call it intrusive, but it captures the creeping danger of the German advances on England really well. This movie uses a calendar feature that tracks each passing day, and we are never allowed to forget that Germany is rapidly advancing across Europe. All of those days spell imminent doom for Britain, which is inching closer to defeat at the hands of the Nazis every day. 

The best thing about Darkest Hour is that it never loses sight of the man at the center of England’s survival, for as much or as little as the film is willing to explore his complexities. Even if we're not afforded glimpses into the darker corners of Churchill's life, not everything has to be a Vanity Fair-caliber deconstruction or defamation of a historical figure. Oldman's unforgettable performance carries the movie and its goals as far as they are willing to go, which, when you have a performance of this quality, is really far. One truly touching moment in this movie features Churchill taking the Tube through the London Underground, asking Londoners about their thoughts on the conflict. Their words? Never surrender. The high-pitched tenor of a young girl grabs Churchill's attention, and it is here that we are allowed to see Churchill at his most vulnerable, as he realizes that even the youngest in his country have that patriotic fervor he's been fighting so hard to maintain in his own life. This movie humanizes him, not necessarily by focusing on his flaws, but rather by being interested in his weaknesses. 

Darkest Hour is Churchill not at his most complicated, but at his most emotionally complex. I'm not one to recontextualize history, to write an op-ed about how the heroes of the past that we look up to were actually horrible racists. In the future, we ourselves will be judged by standards that are not our own, and in some ways, I'm grateful that this movie allowed Churchill to be the kind person that all of us aspire to be in our own way, free of any intrusive critiques reeking of modernistic snobbery. Oldman is an absolute powerhouse of eccentric gentility, more than capable of bearing the weight of this entire movie on his shoulders, despite its relative simplicity. The Best Performance Oscar that Oldman would go on to win is only the perfect exclamation point to as fitting a tribute as a man who saved the free world could ever get. 

Darkest Hour - 9/10

Luke 12:48