Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an emotional crisis due to the political maneuverings against him and the enormousness of the challenge he faced as the Nazis bore down on Britain’s army in France. Smith is right. Nothing in the historical record supports the idea that Churchill faltered internally in his determination to face down the Nazi menace and achieve victory against Hitler.
But screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director Joe Wright are up to something interesting here that only becomes fully clear at the end. Their use of Churchill, as essayed by Gary Oldman in one of the juiciest performances you will ever be privileged to watch, isn’t biographical. It’s metaphorical. The Churchill we see here may have the familiar jowly countenance, the indelible plummy accent, the singular wit, and the soulful romanticism of the one-of-a-kind original. But Darkest Hour isn’t really about him at all, notwithstanding the fact that Oldman is onscreen nearly every moment and gives an old-fashioned, right-downstage-hogging-the-spotlight, hammy, glorious, barn-burner of a turn that makes you want to shout “bravo” and toss bouquets at the screen.
No, Darkest Hour is the story of how, after he at last ascended to the top of the greasy pole, Winston Churchill came to embody and represent the iron soul of Great Britain at its moment of utter existential peril. The movie’s portrait of a journey taken by Churchill from uncertainty to resolve may be factitious, but if you take it as a portrait of the stiffening of Britain’s spine, it speaks a truth.
Darkest Hour is taken pretty directly from John Lukacs’s wonderful 1999 book Five Days in London (I sure hope Lukacs, still alive and kicking at 93, got some money out of it). As in the Lukacs book, the primary conflict isn’t with Germany but with members of Churchill’s own Tory party, led by the sniffy Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane). The conflicts are both political and practical.
Politically, the old guard is suspicious and disdainful of Churchill, who had left the Tory party, rejoined it (“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat,” he had said), and by the 1930s was speaking powerfully against the Tory embrace of the appeasement of Hitler. Practically, Halifax and his allies are defeatist, viewing the German march through Western Europe as an unstoppable force and a separate peace with Hitler as the only hope for Britain’s survival.
They want to maneuver Churchill into saying explicitly that he will not enter into negotiations with Germany so that they can call a vote of no confidence, kick him out of 10 Downing Street, and put in Halifax instead. Yes, this is a movie in which you know who the bad guys are because they want “peace talks.” (I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.)
This is all taking place against the backdrop of the disastrous situation of the British Expeditionary Force in France, whose hundreds of thousands of men had been pushed back to the beach at Dunkirk (you may recall an earlier film this year on that topic). Efforts to fight until the end are likely to mean the wholesale capture and destruction of Britain’s armed forces, which will not only knock Britain out of the war entirely but leave the Isles largely defenseless. But, as Churchill rages, “you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
This is where the movie takes the turn for which Smith scolds it. Oldman’s Churchill finds himself undone by the burdens of power. Halifax’s implacable hostility and the situation in France cause Churchill to lose his blustering self-confidence. He is on the verge of a nervous collapse. Infected by the doubts and pessimism of his war cabinet, unable to see a way out of the thicket, and haunted by the loss of 4,000 men in Calais whom he used as a diversion to keep the Germans from attacking Dunkirk, Churchill begins to entertain the necessity of trying to reason with the tiger.
His strength is only renewed by encounters with Britons both high and low. A previously unfriendly King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn, a superb actor like Oldman seemingly capable of playing anyone from any nation of any class) visits Churchill late at night in his bedchamber after being forced to contemplate the royal family’s evacuation from Britain, and promises the prime minister his support. George tells him to “go to the people” for inspiration. Churchill decides to descend into the London Underground and ask the common folk what they think—should they fight to the end? Man, woman, and child, they tell him yes.
Ridiculous though these scenes may be from a historical standpoint, they are charming and enlivening in the movie itself. More than that, they make it clear that what we are seeing in Darkest Hour is a portrait of Britain rising to meet its greatest challenge. Churchill becomes their voice, their heart, their spirit. This isn’t a biopic. Like Hamilton, it’s really a pageant. And a thrilling one.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’S movie critic.
