Huge success for Oldman ... with more than a little help from dear Winston

Rating: 10/10 (1 April 2018)

And so to Joe Wright and Anthony McCarten's much-vaunted and Oscar-rewarded "Darkest Hour", which I caught up with after so much had already been said about it, on IMDb and elsewhere.
The first thing worth noting is that this is a Churchill film and a wartime Britain film more than it is a war film. It covers just a small part of the entire conflict, and shows even that in vignette form. The most compelling of these concerns the late May 1940 "Defence of Calais", which I must confess I had not even heard of. Many thanks to the makers for raising this issue, though slightly less praise for their take on it, given that Wikipedia tells us that: a) this was a British-French operation, b) although it did cost 300 British lives (+200 wounded) that was out of 4000, so this was NOT quite a suicidal bloodbath, c) 3500 Brits were captured, along with many thousands of French, and d) a few British troops were actually rescued from the port.
In any case, Calais may have achieved - at least in part - the mission Churchill had for it, and that is a fascinating and profoundly heroic story that must be recalled.
Dunkirk is shown as a single (not especially convincing) scene, though its success (and Winston's success therein) is of course referred to.
So otherwise, we are down to a film about wartime Britain, whose ordinary people and at-times humdrum way of life are lionised, as they were in other recent offerings like "Their Finest". This stands in clear opposition to the portrayal of aristocratic types like Chamberlain and Halifax, who are seen here intent on suing for peace with Hitler, in the face of what they deem certain defeat and an unwinnable situation.
We must be careful with our reception of these portrayals (ordinary Brits then were of course at times rude, selfish, cowardly, profiteering and full of moans, and some even went on strike). Yet it is now impossible for many of us to remain dry-eyed when we have the ordinary people of 1940 shown to us, and more so when we imagine the contrast between them and the part-complicit, part-enslaved folk of Nazi Germany.
History must have its way - and from the perspective of 2018, every single man, woman and child in the wartime UK was just simply a hero doing his or her bit. End of.
That said, this film's pressing (and actually fully justified) need to somehow symbolise the circumventing of slimy politicians and other layers of authority to expose the visceral (guts-dominated) link between Churchill and the mass of the British people comes close to derailing the whole effort, with a Tube-train scene so incongruous and near-embarrassing that one has to "close one's eyes and think of England" in order to bat on with the piece at all!
Of course, the effort to swallow this heavy touch of the naff is well rewarded!
And so to Churchill, and a Gary Oldman portrayal that obviously rises above all else here. Nevertheless, Kristin Scott Thomas does well (as she always does) in the role of wife Clemmie, while Ben Mendelsohn offers an impressively conviction performance as King George VI. A couple of scenes of the unlikely and at-first-awkward pairing between the King and Winston really hit home, and are both highly informative and deeply touching.
But Oldman's Churchill is memorable in the truest sense, since one comes back to it repeatedly in the days after the cinema visit. It is not quite mimicry (of the voice, for example), and indeed it offers a touch of what we have not seen before - an at times rather tongue-tied, spluttery and undecided Winston, soused in alcohol and veiled in cigar smoke, oldish and even a touch confused.
And, needless to say, and as the star freely admitted, the Oldman performance here, and indeed "Darkest Hour" as a whole, would not be what it is if Churchill had not been the man HE was. His simply endless list of pithy quotes finds quite rich reflection in the film, and we do indeed see a not-much-liked man of battered reputation who now begins taking brilliant decisions and does indeed "mobilise the English language and send it into battle".
When our hero really needs to be eloquent he can be so, and when he needs to be sober he is. He is supremely literate, cultured yet crude, vigorous and impetuous, childish and supremely mature. As in life, so here, he cries at the terrible decisions he must take, yet takes them just the same. Oldman offers us all of this, and somehow hints at background and depth he does not even present or protray. He embodies so surprisingly much of the Churchill we have read about. You know, the bricklaying historian, the experienced soldier and former POW, the Nobel Prizewinning writer, the racconteur, the painter of paintings, the loyal and loving husband, dumb school pupil and near-genius, the boy neglected by both parents, the son of a dissatisfied (and syphilis-crazed) father, the Tory (but also defecting to the Liberals) toff who could never be loved by ordinary people yet was (until 1945 when he suddenly wasn't), the maker of bad or controversial decisions and the greatest hero we have ever produced.
The man who saved civilisation from unutterable evil.
We have already seen countless portrayals of Churchill, and all have added something to our understanding of this impossible, wonderful man.
But none have quite managed what Gary Oldman has managed ... of course with a great deal of help from Winston himself.