Darkest Hour

(Warning: contains spoilers for Darkest Hour)

There seems to be a focus on World War 2 at the moment - 2017 alone brought Churchill, Their Finest, Dunkirk, to name three.  2018 begins with Oscar hopeful Darkest Hour, tracing the early days of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister for the United Kingdom in 1940.

Gary Oldman well on his way to nicotine poisoning...

Gary Oldman is already garnering much praise for his portrayal of the titular character.  At the time of writing, he's received the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild award, AACTA international award, Alliance of Women Film Journalists award, Critics Choice award, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association award, Hollywood Film award, New York Film Critics award, Online Film Critics Society award, Palm Springs International Film Festival award, St Louis Film Critics Association award, Washington DC Area Film Critics Association award, and Women Film Critics Circle Award.  So by the time he receives the BAFTA and the Oscar (both of which seem inevitable), there will be nothing left to say in the acceptance speeches and nobody left to thank.  Oldman has ticked all the Oscars boxes - troubled, historical figure, overcoming adversity and deliberately disfiguring himself in order to look the part.  He's taken things to Daniel Day-Lewis lengths of Method by accidentally giving himself nicotine poisoning during the filming (due to a frankly ridiculous amount of cigars).  He has been a pub discussion favourite for while ("who is the best actor never to have won an Oscar?") and now it seems likely that the Academy will reward his depiction of the wartime PM.  Deservedly so.  Oldman (as well as being unrecognisable in makeup and prosthetics) portrays a figure who is derided for his past decisions, distrusted by his own party, given a job he doesn't necessarily want at a time when every decision matters, whilst also being simultaneously absolutely sure of his decisions and absolutely full of doubt and fear at the "what ifs..." of them.  His introduction is great - his reputation as cantankerous and difficult being spelled out to his new secretary - Miss Layton - on her first day as she is ushered into his bedroom/study.  Our first glimpse of Churchill is as he lights up his first cigar of the morning, and his familiar features are caught briefly by matchlight.  As the film progresses, we see many sides of Churchill and Oldman plays them with aplomb - the blustering, angry, difficult to please Churchill, the catatonically depressed Churchill, the trying-to-be-better Churchill, the family-man Churchill and the barnstorming public speaker Churchill.  To give you some idea of how good Gary Oldman is in this part - Daniel Day-Lewis is also up for the Best Actor Oscar this year.  Nobody is talking about Daniel Day-Lewis.

To be fair, he will really go out of his way to be the best at being sad now...

Whether it will win Best Picture though is up for debate.  Certainly, Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything) has written a compelling script - more political thriller than wartime biopic, and loudly trumpeting the belief that words do more than guns.  It takes careful steps to explain what is going on on both a global scale (the reticence of Roosevelt to help feels like a personal blow) and national scale (with the scenes of wartime everyday London).  As a result, events like the Dunkirk evacuation feel like they have actual meaning and consequence, in a way that Nolan's Dunkirk didn't quite master.  However, as with The Theory of Everything it presumes some knowledge of the main character and the people around him.  So without knowledge of, for example, Churchill's prolonged and recurrent episodes of depression, you may be forgiven for wondering why he's sitting on a bed in a state of undress, staring at the wall.  Some better explanation of what all the politicians are playing at wouldn't go amiss either (all very House of Cards, with backstabbing aplenty, but I wonder how much sense it makes to an uninformed audience).  It also seems that McCarten did some careful plotting to bring the action to Dunkirk, and knew that he wanted to get to the rousing "We shall fight on the beaches" speech to end the film, but wasn't quite sure how to couple the two together.  Thus, there is an entirely fictitious scene in which Churchill rides the Underground, meets the "common folk" who all tell him that everything he's doing is brilliant and they definitely want to keep fighting - a scene so oddly specific in its naming of the characters, that I assumed it must be a random true anecdote.  It's not, which means the film wanders needlessly into schmaltz.
There's some interesting suggestions peppered throughout the film, however.  For example, that Neville Chamberlain's (Ronald Pickup) decision to support Churchill rather than encourage party dissent (if Chamberlain agreed with Churchill's speech, he would wave his handkerchief so that everyone would follow his lead) was a symptom of his progressing terminal cancer, rather than a change of heart.  Or that Churchill offered counsel to King George VI about whether to move his family and govern from Canada.  McCarten's poetic licence feels a little less artificial here.

As with Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), I am not sure why Joe Wright is not recognised for his work as director.  His direction provides a striking film - from tiny cramped bunkers to grand state rooms, the direction makes for a beautiful film, with well used shards of light, ascending and descending lift shafts, and exhilarating aerial shots of the suicide attack at Calais.  Wright's directorial choices make the film slow down and speed up at exactly the right plot points and as such, the 2 hour film zips by.

George VI hoped his mirror was broken...

There's not too much for the women of the film to do, and the success of whether or not it's a feminist friendly film rests on what you think the film is.  Both Clementine Churchill (Dame Kristen Scott Thomas) and Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) both exist to more fully flesh out the facets of Churchill, which is fine if you contend that Darkest Hour is a Churchill biopic, but less so if you don't.  That said, Scott Thomas and James do a lot to make their small character roles memorable and their actions help progress the plot.

As for whether Oldman's Churchill is accurate or not, Elizabeth Layton (who became Elizabeth Nel) was Churchill's personal secretary from 1941-1945.  In her memoires, she describes Churchill thus; "Sometimes [while dictating a letter] his voice would become thick with emotion, and occasionally a tear would run down his cheek. As inspiration came to him, he would gesture with his hands, just as one knew he would be doing when he delivered his speech, and the sentences would roll out with so much feeling that one died with the soldiers, toiled with the workers, hated the enemy, strained for victory ... [T]hat great man – who could at any time be impatient, kind, irritable, crushing, generous, inspiring, difficult, alarming, amusing, unpredictable, considerate, seemingly impossible to please, charming, demanding, inconsiderate, quick to anger and quick to forgive – was unforgettable. One loved him with a deep devotion. Difficult to work for – yes, mostly; loveable – always; amusing – without fail."

That is definitely the Churchill of this film. 

Additional comments, thoughts, questions:

Just this, really...

Dunkirk

(Warning: contains spoilers for Dunkirk.  But it happened 77 years ago, so you should probably know the ending already)

Dunkirk has been one of the more eagerly anticipated films of 2017.  The first trailers for the film premiered around the same time as Suicide Squad and then there was little by way of promotion until its release this year.  Which, in an era of promotional campaigns and teaser trailers makes it unusual.  But this is an unusual Christopher Nolan film.  Although you could comfortably play a decent game of "Christopher Nolan bingo" (Emma Thomas producing? Check.  Hans Zimmer composing?  Check.  Lee Smith editing?  Check.  Michael Caine?  Check - he's there as a cameo, marking his seventh time in a Nolan film), it is based on a true story and is surprisingly less than two hours long. 

The film is about the Dunkirk evacuation (also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, and operation Dynamo) that occurred over nine days in 1940.  British, French and Belgian troops found themselves trapped on the exposed beaches of Dunkirk, unable to retreat to Britain, while dogfights roared overhead.  800 boats of varying shapes and sizes (including ferries, fishing boats and lifeboats) set off to try and collect as many people as possible.  Over 300,000 people were rescued, and it led to Churchill's now infamous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech.

Critically acclaimed (currently scoring 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic), and generating a lot of online chatter, I was keen to see what it was like.

I was disappointed.

There is a lot to commend it.  Generally, historians agree that it is broadly accurate and not glammed up for Hollywood.  This is always pleasing to hear, particularly with regards to World War 1 and 2 depictions as there are fewer and fewer people alive today who can confirm what it was actually like to be there at that time.  Nolan and his team have been painstaking in detail (compare the differing uniforms of various characters throughout the film), and Nolan himself made a point of not attempting to film Dunkirk until he had a lot more experience as a director of big-screen productions.  that is to his credit.  Audiences cannot help but realise how cold, desolate, bleak and dangerous everything about the situation was.

Hans Zimmer's score is excellent at ratcheting up tension to almost unbearable heights.  There is an almost steady drone throughout, which leads to paranoia and uncertainty - is that part of the soundtrack? An enemy plane?  Both?  As a result, the film is uncomfortable viewing, because the audience can never settle because the next barrage of action is always imminent.

The story-telling has an interesting conceit - there are three overlapping storylines (air, sea and land), told at three different times, which means that, like it or not, I'm going to have to watch this film again to better understand exactly what happened.  The dialogue is minimal, so for the most part Dunkirk runs almost as a silent film.  Sometimes you just don't need words.

So far, so good.  And those are three very strong ticks in the "good film" box - looks good, sounds good, is honest.  But, for me, it isn't enough.

For a start, it's a 12A war film, meaning that the people who die do so cleanly, quickly and in one piece.  Even those with no experience of war know that this cannot possibly be true.  Weaponry is not so kind.  Films like Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and Apocalypse Now have set the bar high for a shocking and compelling account of what warfare is like.  Dunkirk is almost bloodless as a film, and given that Nolan has set out to be as accurate as possible, this seems like a very strange decision to make.  Thus begging the question: who is this film for?

Secondly, it lacks personal story.  For me, the most interesting storyline was the one in the sea where Mark Rylance's character (Mr Dawson) sets off in his little fishing boat with his son, Peter and their friend, George.  Along the way, they pick up a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) who is understandably panicked that their intention is to go to Dunkirk - the very place that he is now trying to avoid.  Their story is a constant tension between two competing points of view, both of which are completely understandable.  This is what brought the enormity of the situation to life for me - that Mr Dawson and his young companions who had no experience whatsoever, were off into the middle of a warzone in a boat that wasn't built for conflict, to rescue damaged soldiers (with no way of treating them), with no instruction from land, no way of proving that they were allies, and little more than a limited amount of tea to offer.  That story is fascinating, but a fraction of the running time is devoted to it.  I would have watched an entire film of that story (Mark Rylance, as always, is impossible not to watch).  Instead, this competes with nameless, faceless, story-less characters in the air (where Tom Hardy is) and on the beaches (where Harry Styles is) and I don't know why I'm supposed to care as much about them.

An entire film of this story, please.  Thanks.

Personal story, I believe, is critical for big scale stories like Dunkirk.  I know that millions of people died in World War 2.  I know that it affected generations to come.  But on film, you need to have at least some identifying figures to understand the scale, and why it matters.  It is sad when people die, but it becomes tragic when we understand them as individuals and not just one of a number.  Which is why scenes like this, are imperative and why (to me) Dunkirk is less of a film for not featuring them.

Thirdly, this film is solely about white, English-speaking men.  To the best of my knowledge, war (particularly world war) is not so selective.  In the real-life Dunkirk, 1 in every 4 crewmen on British merchant vessels was a lascar, and the majority of them were from South East Asia, or Africa.  Women were trained to parachute behind enemy lines, disrupt communication, treat the injured and the dying.  In Dunkirk, they cheerily hand out bread and jam and not much else.  That, in itself, is another odd decision.

Finally, if you see this film having little to no idea about what the Dunkirk evacuation was, you may leave the film none the wiser.  Much as the posters say that this is "the event that shaped our world", there isn't much to put it into a context, or explain the difference that all those "ordinary" members of the public in their boats made.  Explaining the evacuation to the House of Commons, Churchill described the situation as "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army has been stranded at Dunkirk, about to perish or be captured."  The evacuation, he claimed, was nothing short of a miracle.  A national day of prayer was called before the evacuation started, such was the hopelessness felt by everything going on.  The rescue of 300,000 soldiers was arguably one of the main things that enabled the war to continue to the conclusion that it did.  Nolan stated he was keen to "not get [the film] bogged down in politics", but I would argue that without a greater context, it lacks a lot of impact.

I don't get it.  There are reviews I have read that says this is Nolan's best film ever, that this is the best war film ever made, and that it's an instant classic.  That was not the film I saw.  This is disappointing.  Made even more disappointing that Nigel Farage thinks that it is the very metaphor for Brexit.

Who wears a suit to the cinema?

The only conclusion I can come to is that there are three versions of Dunkirk: the one I saw, the one film critics saw and the one Nigel Farage saw.  That's the only explanation that makes sense.  And there are fewer and fewer people who were there who can tell us which one is right.