Let it be said that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to one man’s brilliance with words. All his life Winston Churchill was a passionate devotee, advocate and practitioner of the English language. ‘Darkest Hour’ celebrates as much this integral facet of his personality, deservedly writ large over all the other intrinsic, salient qualities of that great historical cliché, “the right man, at the right place, at the right time.”
In this handsome war film from Joe Wright, words, rather than guns, are the main weapons. And as wielded by Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman), words can be every bit as persuasive and effective as bullets.
The film, which covers Churchill’s rocky, uncertain first few weeks in the role of prime minister of a Great Britain poised on the very brink of wartime disaster, works best as a celebration of the art of stirring political oratory. Playing out in airless, oak-panelled Westminster boardrooms and the crepuscular tunnels of the Cabinet War Rooms and underground bunkers, it is unapologetically wordy, more akin to a stage play than a conventional film. And at its best, this is a glorious showcase for Churchill’s ornate verbal flourishes both eminently rousing and satisfying.
This is bolstered by a conceit. Early on in the film, Clementine Churchill (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells another character that her husband is “just a man, like any other”. It is a joke that just about everyone who has even the remotest inkling of history is likely to get. Even those with the most tenuous grasp of Britain’s past will know that Churchill was simply not a man like any other. During its long and rich history, what Shakespeare referred to un ‘Richard II’ as “this sceptered isle” has had great, good, bad and mediocre leaders. Against the sweep of this company, Churchill occupies nothing less than a pedestal all to himself as the prime minister who led his country through a struggle for national survival, the like of which it had never before seen and has never since experienced. The stakes were vertiginous when he replaced the woefully discredited Neville Chamberlain at Number 10. The choices made in the early weeks of Churchill’s premiership became a hinge point in history for in play was not just the freedom of a few islands but the very future of an entire continent.
This makes the Churchill legend one deserving of his country’s pride and at the same time it presents us with several problems. He is a challenge for actors who try to embody him and for the British (if not Western world) politicians who have followed him. There is also a Churchill conundrum for the country that remembers -- and occasionally misremembers -- his role in its history.
As the wartime generation fades away, more and more will only know him -- or think we do -- from the versions we see on screen (sadly, who reads anymore?). Some of the finest actors have essayed a try in recent years. There was a cameo Churchill from Timothy Spall in ‘The King’s Speech,’ which was rightly chastised for taking some liberties with the history of his relationship with the monarchy. John Lithgow offered an empathetic Churchill in his second, peacetime, period as prime minister for the popular (and popularized) Netflix series ‘The Crown.’ He is never actually seen on screen during Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk,’ but a Churchillian spirit infused that spare, strangely immersive account of the British army’s narrow escape from France in 1940. Brian Cox was a jowl-quivering Churchill in last year’s film of the same name, which presented him not as the imperturbable war leader but as a man wracked with doubts about the risks of attempting the 1944 Normandy landings.
Swathed in a fat suit and the aforementioned jowly prosthetics, Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning incarnation is powerful enough to sear through layers of latex. While this film does not quite manage to avoid some of the Churchillian tropes -- there is a lot of cigar-chomping and whisky-swigging -- Oldman succeeds in creating a figure who is far more compelling than the “bulldog” of simple legend. This Winston is courageous, martial and inspirational, yet also simultaneously beleaguered, occasionally uncertain, playful and earthy, fearsome and maudlin, cunning and loving, bad-tempered, sentimental and tearful. He is a man that contains multitudes and we are constantly reminded that the superman was, just as his wife said, a man. He was a genius not because he was without faults but precisely because he transcended his flaws, which ultimately makes him such a remarkable example of our species.
And what an intimidating, inspiring challenge to each politician who has followed him not only in Number 10 Downing Street, but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 24 Sussex Drive, and all the domiciles of those heads of state or of government in what constitutes the “Free World” today. At some level, every prime minister of the United Kingdom since has known that they will never be able to match his place in history. In fact, on today’s rather baleful global political scene, he is more than a challenge -- he is an ostentatious rebuke to those who have come after.
We wish for politicians who aspire to do more with language than marshal banalities, incite division and rouse nastiness. Messrs Trump, Putin, Xi and Duterte your fifteen minutes are loudly ticking: there is a pervasive feeling that there is no one like Churchill -- or anywhere close to being like him -- among contemporary political leaders on any continent. It is our misfortune to be passing through a period when the worst sort of leader uses passion in the service of malevolence while the better types struggle to articulate much (or anything) by way of uplifting conviction. Do we have a yearning for leadership that combines principle, vision and humanity with the capacity to mobilise and unify people behind a collective and heroic endeavour? One suspects that we do.
We surely also pine for politicians who aspire to do more with language than recite banalities, incite division and rouse nastiness. ‘Darkest Hour’ bases itself around three of Churchill’s finest speeches: his debut to parliament as prime minister, his first radio address to a frightened nation and another speech to MPs following the Dunkirk evacuation. In that short span of just three weeks, Churchill produced a trio of some of the most influential feats of oratory when, in the words of Edward R Murrow, “he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle”. He weaponised the language more effectively that anyone who has come since.
It would be unreasonable to expect today’s politicians to match the Churchillian style. His lavish and bombastic pronouncements are stirring in a historical drama, but they aren’t fitted to our times when television and social media are the principal environments in which contemporary politicians must operate. That said, his most memorable phrases continue to echo in eternity because they are timeless in their potency and just so much better than anything to be heard from politicians of this age. Who else could craft rhetorical tours de forces such as:
“I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. Victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”
“We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”
Wow.
Compare and mournfully contrast the power of his oratorical poetry with a hastily-typed Donald Trump tweet or Theresa May coughing her way through an interminable conference speech or a faceless, bland Southeast Asian technocratic minister reading so closely from scripted lines his face is practically buried in the typeface. In as much as contemporary political players pay homage to Churchill, it is the dismal tribute of offering bastardised versions of his wartime rhetoric in self-serving support of their own causes that so rankles. May does this with her awful “Brexit means Brexit”; Trump recycles the words “beautiful,” “huge” (or “yuge”) and “horrible” at the limits of his Grade 4 vocabulary while Xi Jinping goes on about a “China Dream” or “Belt and Road” that barely spans the unimaginatively banal to the vague, short on hope and long on yuan signs.
So too do subpar leaders seem to begat subpar times. How painful it is to contrast our present circumstances to what was at stake in 1940, when there was a genuine danger of Britain becoming at best nothing more than “a vassal state” of Nazism (at worse a smouldering ruin), with the phoney and petty eddies that foam around many of the so-called Brexit “arguments.” The current British cabinet bickers about whether the nation should aspire to be Canada plus or Norway minus. Trump ventilates about China posting trade surpluses while curiously tolerant of a Russia who assassinates and destabilizes without punishment, much less chastisement from the great Orange One with the ludicrous “fake and bake” tan. What wretchedly pathetic mud wrestling compared with the awesome (and awful) choice facing Britain when Churchill became prime minister.
Just as Britain beats its retreat from Europe, and its parliament prepares to ratify the chaotic abandonment of a union intended to prevent another war, Joe Wright -- who himself was no stranger to Dunkirk scenes (see ‘Atonement’) -- energetically directs this undeniably exciting and beguiling account of Winston Churchill’s Moment in 1940, as Hitler’s forces assemble across the Channel, poised to invade. Written by Anthony McCarten, of Stephen Hawking biopic, ‘The Theory of Everything’ fame, ‘Darkest Hour’ breaks no new ground in Churchillian insights, yet overcomes the occasionally distant dialogue style to succeed in telling a familiar yet interesting story with competence.
One of the things most to like about ‘Darkest Hour’ is its conspicuous fairness, not depicting any single character as cartoonish appeasers of fascism, but rather as men sincerely convinced that fighting on will be tantamount to nothing less than national suicide. To them, Churchill’s fine rhetoric is beside the point compared with the brute power of Hitler’s hugely destructive weapons. In quasi-Shakespearean style Halifax sneers that Churchill is capable only of “Words and words and only more words,” while urgent cation was needed to avoid disaster. Though he was ultimately proven wrong, and that words were enough to stiffen resolve when there was nothing else, this became evident only with hindsight. Much of the British military leadership at the time thought invasion imminent and defeat unavoidable. In this context Churchill’s determination to fight on appears all the braver, even though it could have just as easily gone the other way.
To fight on -- or to take up an offer from Mussolini’s Italy to mediate a peace with Hitler? That is the epic question around which revolves the essential political drama of ‘Darkest Hour.’ The film reminds us that the choice made by Churchill was not at all obviously the correct one to many of his colleagues. He began his wartime premiership as a much-distrusted figure within the Tory party. Though it later suited everyone to pretend that he was the inevitable choice as prime minister, a significant number of his colleagues thought it should be anyone but him.
McCarten conjures up not only a period piece but also a political thriller: it is May 1940 as told ‘House of Cards’ style with the new wartime Prime Minister up against a cabal of politicians who want to bring him down. It’s interesting for a film to remind us that appeasement as an issue did not vanish the moment that Churchill took over as Prime Minister; despite the famous David Low cartoon, not everyone was right behind him, rolling up their sleeves. Here, his immediate enemies do not seem to be Hitler and Mussolini as much as Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, agitating for an empire-saving deal with the Nazis and scheming to undermine Churchill’s cabinet and parliamentary leadership position.
They are played respectively by Ronald Pickup and Stephen Dillane, both strong actors, the latter masterly at portraying an aristocratic, vaguely disdainful malignancy despite his outward impassivity. Dillane makes Halifax out to be a Machiavellian player in much the same way he endowed Thomas Jefferson with flinty arrogant haughtiness in the admirable HBO miniseries ‘John Adams.’ Always reliable Ben Mendelsohn plays monarch George VI, who while initially wary at first, becomes an eventual Churchill convert, with an apocryphal scene between the two of them in which the King “bonds” with his prime minister, and seeks to stiffen Winston’s resolve to see things through. All of this takes place while the soundtrack by composer Dario Marianelli and contributed to by pianist Víkingur Ólafsson provides suitably understated power that backdrops the passing of great events, providing the right balance between political / military sound and an emotional palette which gave the story proper musical depth.
In May 1940, many Britons were very fearful, and understandably so, of carrying on the war. It had not been that long ago that crowds thronged to cheer Chamberlain when he returned from Munich with his hoary “peace for our time”. Britons were still scarred by the awful meat-grinder carnage of the trenches of the first world war. The advent of airpower added to the horror of a conflict of indefinite duration that the country could not be at all confident of surviving. It was really only after the unexpected deliverance at Dunkirk and during the following Battle of Britain that the nation solidified behind Churchill’s view that there could be no compromising with the menace of Nazism.
This is one of the many aspects of Winston Churchill to admire. When he started to deliver his fighting speeches, he couldn’t be sure that he would carry Britain with him. He did not tell the public what they all wanted to hear; he used his powers of advocacy and inspiration to rally parliament and the people behind him. He did not follow polls or public opinion. He led it. That is at the heart of his magnificence, which ‘Darkest Hour’ captures so well. It is also another reason to mourn the lack of contemporary politicians who aspire to follow his example.