Jowly, chubby, blustery, cinema-ready, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill is an exercise in How to Win the Golden Globes and Maybe the Oscar. Which aspiring actor wouldn't want to become Churchill at least once, to act out that avuncular theatricality and grandiose temper, to assume that oratory bombast and majestic eloquence? They say you have to play a madman or a psychopath to get a shot at a best actor prize. Now we should add British prime minister into the list -- just ask Meryl Streep and now Oldman.
In Darkest Hour, Oldman's performance -- which just won him best actor at the Globes on Monday -- is the raison d'être of the whole enterprise. It is satisfying watching the actor disappearing into the make-up and that makes him unrecognisable and hearing him emulate the PM's pattern of speech, the furious loquacity as well as the stammering hesitation. The camera finds its purpose in him, his face, his lips, the quivering of cheeks and the squinting of eyes; Churchill/Oldman is almost in every shot of the 125-minute film. It also feels, nevertheless, like a stunt, a high-quality stunt from an actor so assured of his technique, so well-calibrated and so proud of that "unrecognisability" of his own face and body. It's an art that advertises itself in bold letters, underlined and highlighted, that it is art.
Oh, and the film: Darkest Hour tells the story of how Churchill is thrown into a great crisis right after King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) makes him PM. The Nazi panzers have occupied most of Europe, France and Belgium are falling, and over 300,000 British troops are cornered in the most desperate circumstance on the beach of Dunkirk (Darkest Hour could make a double with either Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk or, less appealingly, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech). What Darkest Hour, written by Anthony McCarten, focuses on is the internal politicking and party squabbling as Churchill's Cabinet members -- led by the scheming Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) and Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) -- attempt to oust him in order to push forth their plan to negotiate with Hitler.
This is a fine-looking, old-fashioned, literal-minded prestige picture, with a rousing, high-spirited score and unmistakable intent of hero-worshipping. Taking place mostly in the cavernous war cabinet bunkers, the film is pacy, engaging, and hews close to historical fact -- though to be honest it's a fact that we've long known and leaves little room for surprise, such as the outcome of the Dunkirk evacuation, or that, well, Churchill prevailed and Hitler lost!
Compare Darkest Hour to, say, the Netflix series The Crown, both of them sharing a few characters and events. The former is a straight arrow, while the latter treats history as a bottomless archive under whose depths hides countless astonishments. The former is linear, pompous, unimaginative; the latter treats history as interpretative, suggestive, almost sexy. And if both of them eventually reveal all their cards and make clear their status as Imperialist propaganda, Darkest Hour wears it all on its sleeves while The Crown at least invites you in and asks you to contemplate.
The scene that gives Darkest Hour away is -- you can't miss it -- the fictitious underground ride during which Churchill consults a motley of hard-working British people about war strategy, and after which he concludes that, of course, he must not surrender to the madman Hitler. This is, again, a literal-minded exhibition of Churchill's quality as a people's leader, an odd uncle who happens to hold all the power as well.
At the end it's Oldman's acting that keeps us on the ride, the kind of acting which should be viewed not as a historical recreation but an entertainment in itself. Personally, I would prefer a rerun of Dunkirk or The Crown. But what Darkest Hour lacks in imagination is made up for, to an extent, by Oldman's presence.
