Joe Wright's Darkest Hour

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2018)

Last year ended with a number of good-quality political thrillers. However, for some reasons nobody considered Joe Wright's "Darkest Hour" as a formidable rival to Spielberg's "The Post". Theaters were almost empty during it's performances and the movie hardly covered the production budget. This represents a rare case when cinema-fans made a serious mistake creating their expectations. Monumental biopic about the life of Winston Churchill appeared to be not another British fake, but rather quite strong masterpiece with impressive cast and great director's work.
Movie takes us back to May, 1940. Nazi Germany is about to invade Belgium. British Parliament demands the resignation of Neville Chamberlain from the role of Prime Minister due to his incapability of leading the nation during the war time. The only man whom both party will support happens to be Winston Churchill, then-First Lord of the Admiralty. Although, Churchill was right about the nature of Adolf Hitler, he has a poor reputation in Parliament and a very few supporters. The world is on the edge of terrible events. With the completely unprepared public, with weak king George VI who is not ready to unite the nation, with his own party plotting against him, Mr. Churchill must boldly face his life's darkest hour and make right choice which will finally put his name in the list of the greatest politicians in humans history.
Today, politics is considered as something extremely boring. It is hard to imagine exciting movie about, say, Merkel or Obama. However, it was not always like this. End of 19th and first half on 20th century was era of truly great politicians. Some of them were pure evil, some of them were synonyms of goodness. But majority were rather controversial figures. Churchill stands apart all of them. He was a man comprised of contradictions. Perhaps the greatest of all these contradictions was Churchill's dichotomy between public and private life. In the world history, he definitely stands as a bulldog-politician, who became the international symbol of resistance to Nazi far before USSR and USA appeared on the scene. His power as a politician helped to united the British nation during the hardest time in it's history. But not all people know that historical Churchill was also a worldly man. In private life Churchill was insecure, suffered the periods of deep depressions and uncertainty about his own actions. Director Joe Wright tries and explores in full exactly this dichotomy between public and private Churchill.
And he succeeded... with the help of splendid work of Gary Oldman. From the creative introductory scene to the very end of the movie, Oldman step by step introduces us to the true nature of Winston Churchill. The way how he walks, moves and speaks are so good that probably now the name "Churchill" would be associated in our minds firstly with famous "V-for-victory" picture and then immediately with Gary Oldman's tremendous role.
On the other hand, there is no good counterpart to Oldman's character. King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) is quite good but toneless and uncharismatic comparing to the variation which we saw in "King's Speech. Churchill's wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas), with whom Churchill had loving but uneasy relationships played a nice but unremarkable part. Moreover, it is very hard to justify the inclusion the character of Churchill's personal secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily Jamesthe) into the movie. All what she does is shedding from time to time unnatural tiers and distorting us from contemplation over truly important characters.
In short, the movie deserves to enter the grand series of historical biopics about Second World War era and take place among such ingenuous pictures as Imitation Game, Dunkirk and King's Speech. Despite the lack of critical approach to history and overburden patriotism, the movie is definitely a piece of high-quality art.
And in the end, good quote from the movie.
Winston Churchill: Will you stop interrupting me while I am interrupting you!