Exceeded My Expectations

Rating: 7/10 (25 December 2017)

My feelings as I went into the theater were not optimistic. Gary Oldman was absolutely brilliant in Oliver Stone's JFK, but I was afraid that casting him as Winston Churchill was a disaster in the making. Sort of like asking Peter Lorre to switch places with Sidney Greenstreet in THE MALTESE FALCON.
As it happens, though, Gary Oldman is actually pretty good in the role of the embattled but fearless Winston Churchill. His voice is no match of Churchill's, and in fact it's a lot higher pitched. But the meaning still shines through.
Every other review I've read seems to suggest that this movie stands or falls on Gary Oldman's performance alone, but that's not true at all. The thing I loved the most about this movie was not Gary Oldman's bumbling around with a cigar and drink in his hand, trying to look like Churchill. It's the way the other characters react to him -- not always with admiration. Sometimes with fear, sometimes with doubt, sometimes even with horror. But in the end all of them are changed by him to a greater or lesser degree.
I never saw THE KING'S SPEECH because I felt like celebrating the British monarchy is not what movies should be about. But Ben Mendelsohn is spectacular ad the English king. I actually felt more for him than I did for Churchill! Here is a man without much character, or much of a brain, yet he's placed in a position where he has to take a stand. It's almost against his nature to have strong convictions, yet Churchill forces him to feel something for England that's entirely personal, maybe for the first time in his life.
Ronald Pickup was amazing as the luckless Neville Chamberlain, a man who is remembered today only for his flaws, such as weakness, cowardice, and a gullible reliance on the words of Adolph Hitler. This movie made me see Chamberlain from a different perspective, as a man who knows history will despise him but is too big a man to stop trying to help his country survive. By the time he lifted up his handkerchief at the end of the movie I was in tears.
Lily James gives a captivating performance as Churchill's new secretary even though her character is sadly under-written. I do wish there had been some indication of why she was more qualified than any of the hundreds of other girls who must have been available. It made me a little uneasy to see her doing nothing but typing away like a machine for most of the movie -- it sort of reminded me of DOWNFALL. Surely young women contributed more than just their fast fingers and their adoration to England's war effort?
One other thing that struck me as both annoying and gratuitously false was the late-night phone conversation between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. In real life, these two men had been close personal friends for more than twenty years before World War II even began. They liked each other and trusted each other. But for some reason, (to bolster English pride?) director Joe Wright insists on making FDR sound like a liar, a lightweight, and an all-around twit. FDR did what he could, when he could, and he took plenty of political heat in the USA for forcing through things like the Lend Lease Act. More respect is wanted, gentlemen!
Other than that, Darkest Hour exceeded my expectations on many levels. It was poignant, suspenseful, and full of unexpected twists.