Post by StevePulaski on Dec 24, 2017 17:50:18 GMT -5
Darkest Hour (2017)
Directed by: Joe Wright
Directed by: Joe Wright
Gary Oldman's Winston Churchill flashes the "V" in hopes for a victory in Darkest Hour.
Rating: ★★
Joe Wright's Darkest Hour takes place in May 1940, over the span of a couple weeks. It's a tumultuous month for the United Kingdom as Winston Churchill takes over the role as Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlin (Ronald Pickup) is ousted for failure to secure the British empire as the threat of Nazism grows. Churchill and the monarch spend much of the film wrestling over the implications of waging an attack against Adolf Hitler's forces or negotiating peace with them. For Churchill, the choice is easy; the Nazis have asserted themselves as a unit unafraid of violence, so the only logical response in his mind is one that takes military action to try to earn the upper-hand. Not lost on him, however, are the repercussions in the form of the deaths of young soldiers and the disdain King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) has for him.
Much of Wright's film — written by Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything), who also serves as one of the film's producers — focuses on the pariah status of Churchill in the monarch and his frequent attempts to transcend his worst tendencies in order to win the trust of the British in a time of great division. In the meantime, the war inches closer as hundreds of British soldiers are stranded on the French beach Dunkirk, with rescue efforts appearing futile if not conducted within 24 hours. Churchill does his part to work with George and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane), a youthful statesman with more approval than himself, and has a new personal secretary named Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) transcribe his speeches, which ordinarily stem from monologues while Churchill paces around his room. Poor Elizabeth is the one left to decipher words like "ripe," which sound like "right" when Churchill utters them, resulting in mistakes for which she's intensely scolded.
Churchill is played by Gary Oldman, donning a fat-suit and prosthetics that transform the dapper 59-year-old character-actor into a bald, overweight, frenetic leader with a bad attitude. His voice is disguised with a ribbity inflection and a constant need to deliver most of his dialog in fiery exclamations to convey passion. The film is centered around Oldman so frequently that rarely is he ever not in frame, but scarcely do we ever get a look behind the larger-than-life figure that played an integral role in one of the most impacting wars in human history.
Therein lies the main problem with Darkest Hour. It's a two-hour long showcase of everything we've grown accustomed to seeing from the obligatory historical figure biopic that arrives at year's end. This time, we get a tedious, speechifying portrayal of Churchill that exists almost solely for Oldman to have an opportunity at a cursory tour-de-force. The film doesn't explore the emotional nor character complexities one anticipates for a Churchill biopic, so the real challenge for Oldman is emulating the obvious physical and vocal traits of the man because most psychological ones are dismissedby the filmmakers as being perhaps too distracting.
Due to the closeness of their release, Darkest Hour earns comparisons to Dunkirk rather than another biopic for more reasons than the two sharing intertwined subject matter. Dunkirk was a good film that fell short of greatness because amidst the cacophony of war, shown expertly through Christopher Nolan's distinct vision, was the absence of character and interpersonal relationships that ordinarily serve as the heart of war movies. Darkest Hour has the same problem as its sister film. It looks the part and succeeds on the basis of its background details until one zeroes in on the foreground and comes to terms with the fact that there still remains work to be done.
Wright's film, like his last, Pan, the umpteenth cinematic rendition of Peter Pan's story, is costumed from top-to-bottom, with period-specific clothing and architecture remaining prominent in every scene. For a good portion of the film, this makes it easy to feel transported roughly seven decades in the past until it all becomes stuffy as it starts to overcompensate for the lack of human interest in its core subject as well as its supporting cast. No one in the supporting cast ever steps forward to wow you with their convictions because they too feel beaten back into submission by a screenplay that needs to return to Churchill as quickly as possible whenever he's not on-screen or his presence has become diminished. This results in Mendelsohn, Dillane, and most significantly James being terribly wasted accessories in a film that doesn't value their abilities to make splashes as actors.
Finally, it doesn't help that Darkest Hour is overbearing and tedious. Despite the stakes being exorbitantly high in a historical sense and individuals succumbing to their breaking points after hours of negotiating and analyzing, the film doesn't deliver on the suspense inherent to the premise. Before you claim it has to do with the fact that we should know the outcome of the story, as well as the preceding events, the same was true for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Ben Affleck's Argo, and for a smaller bunch, Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game. Darkest Hour lacks urgency, and falls prey to the stifling ambiance that its constrained sets and centeredness on Churchill fail to make riveting to the audience. It's a top-heavy film boiling over with surface details that never transpire into a story that deserves a lot more internal conflict and measurable intensity than Wright and McCarten appear willing to give it. It's a good thing Oldman is good here, for if not, then we'd really have a forgettable piece of bait on our hands.
Starring: Gary Oldman, Ben Mendelsohn, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas, Stephen Dillane, and Ronald Pickup. Directed by: Joe Wright.