‘Darkest Hour’
Directed by Joe Wright
Starring Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas
Rated PG-13
During the year between the fall of France in 1940 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, the United Kingdom stood alone against the advance of fascism.
The facts of the period have become ingrained in the culture but continue to make for fertile dramatic ground.
That’s especially the case in “Darkest Hour,” filmmaker Joe Wright’s accounting of the period from the perspective of Winston Churchill, courtesy of a towering performance by Gary Oldman as the prime minister.
The movie has sweeping cinematic texture, expressed in Wright’s affinity for long takes — his wide-angle visions of the masses in Parliament contrasting with the profound, suffocating isolation of life in the war room bunkers, where Churchill faces a revolt in his cabinet. King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) holds desperate, anguished meetings with the prime minister in the darkened chambers of Buckingham Palace.
It’s a comprehensive depiction of the political front lines of a nation on edge in the face of imminent existential danger. There’s an immersive, tightly drawn quality to the film that has the feel of a slow-burn thriller.
“Darkest Hour” plays as a welcome companion piece to the two movies from earlier this year that centered on different aspects of the same period: Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” and Lone Scherfig’s “Their Finest,” about the nation’s propaganda efforts.
Wright has crafted a singular style that favors grand visual flourishes and ambitious character choices throughout the course of a career highlighted by “Atonement” and the Keira Knightley “Pride & Prejudice.” He pours into this latest work a degree of attention that allows it to rise above the levels of docudrama familiarity to which it might have otherwise descended.
But solely heaping praise on Wright’s vision or Anthony McCarten’s screenplay, would neglect the film’s main attraction: Oldman. The 59-year-old Englishman disappears behind a thick mass of makeup and delivers a performance of volcanic force, colored with deeply ingrained emotional complications.
He resists scenery chewing temptations to instead delve behind the famously defiant and proud public face of Churchill to present a vision of a man filled with great doubts and despair.
These are not familiar notes when it comes to the prime minister. Yet they are rendered with such eloquent precision, framed with such perfectly drawn context as a reflection of the will of his nation, that when he stands before the House of Commons and vows to “fight on the beaches,” it feels as if you’re hearing those words for the very first time.
