"He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2017)

Western civilization still owes an incalculable debt to Winston Churchill, one of the towering figures of the 20th century and the one who more than any other single person was responsible for mobilizing the Allies to confront Hitler at an utterly critical stage of World War II. This movie focusses in on the crucial first two months of Churchill's stint as Prime Minister, May/June 1940 during which the Nazis were overrunning France, having already swept through Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. It looked like Britain would be next, which would effectively leave Europe as a Nazi empire. What then?
In other words, the stakes in this story are very high. Its dramatic arc is not the actual wartime action (though there are scenes of the attack on the garrison at Calais, and arranging for the evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk is mentioned frequently). There are already countless movies WWII movies for that -- name your favorite battle or campaign and there's a film about it. This one shows the political and personal drama going on behind the scenes, leading up to how Churchill changed the course of his country's entire approach to the war.
The "villain" of the movie is not Hitler (who remains offstage) but rather Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary who is seen to relentlessly push for peace negotiations using (of all people) Mussolini as a broker. Halifax and Chamberlain have a number of scenes in which they are essentially plotting to make Churchill step down so that they can once again take over. Their basic argument seems to be that this will be the only way to minimize casualties for their own citizens; who cares about the other countries. I don't know how realistic this part of the script is, but it seems like dramatic exaggeration is going on. My guess is that the role of Halifax stands in for the whole negotiation/appeasement approach that did still have some support in general, despite plenty of evidence that it had already failed (see Chamberlain and the infamous "Peace in Our Time" speech).
As Churchill, this is lead actor Gary Oldman's film; in every scene either he's the dominant figure, or he's the subject of conversation by others. There's no doubt Oldman goes all out for this, absorbing himself into the character as he usually does. In the first half he plays Churchill as somewhat indecisive, uncertain just what to do next, and again I don't know just how realistic this is. Churchill was known to have suffered from intermittent depression for most of his life, but it didn't seem to affect his public persona or decision making. At a turning point in the plot, it looks like he will finally buckle under the relentless pressure from Halifax and his crowd. But then two events turn him around and finally solidify the instincts he has had all along: the first is a direct visit from the King (George VI, played very nicely by Ben Mendelsohn), who tells him that the one person who is the most dismayed by Churchill's taking the PM position is Hitler himself. The second is an entirely fictional (but cinematically pure gold) meeting with a bunch of average citizens riding to work on the Underground, who tell him emphatically that they will never give in to any Nazis. The big payoff is his electrifying speech to Parliament "We shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender". It's a great scene particularly because this is, in a way, the actual time and place that Hitler's defeat was assured.
Everybody else's part in the movie is a supporting one, but I liked the roles played by Lily James (as Churchill's secretary), the underused Kristin Scott Thomas (as Clementine Churchill), and Stephen Dillane in the thankless role of Halifax. Good work all. But coming back to Gary Oldman himself -- obviously no effort was spared in making him up for the part with clothing, prosthetics, cigars (!), body posture and gait and everything else, but he still didn't look convincingly like the real thing. There's something fundamentally different about Churchill's facial structure that all the makeup can't cover for. But in addition to that, the real Churchill's voice had a type of resonance that Oldman can't quite put across. Oldman is no doubt going to get an Oscar nomination, and it's well deserved, but I actually thought he was robbed of the award for his even better work in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). The character of spymaster George Smiley fits him a lot better.
The overall message of this film is a legitimately big one. It's not explicitly said, but it runs unspoken through the whole thing: Individual people matter at the level of world politics as much as they do anywhere else. Individual leaders can plunge their people into the abyss, or they can inspire them forward to amazing accomplishments. It's not any kind of exaggeration to say that Churchill and his powerful oratory turned the tide of World War II. Without him, we would be living in a very different world today.
See this one in combination with "Dunkirk" (also 2017), and the lovely little gem "Their Finest" (2016). They'd make a great little mini-festival centered on the same era of WWII.