Darkest Hour (2017)
Directed by Joe Wright
In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill, who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire.
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Buttoned-up period piece-isms (a la Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech”) are blessedly hard to come by here.
In achieving this, the actor puts himself alongside Brian Cox in Churchill (tremendous performance, mediocre movie) and Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech (possibly the best-ever screen interpretation of the former PM).
Dillane shares some screen time with Ben Mendelsohn’s King George VI (the one Colin Firth played in “The King’s Speech”), and when they’re together, the air is thick with royal privilege.
Whether it’s the House Of Commons, or Buckingham Palace, where Churchill is summoned by an untrusting King George VI (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn in an altogether sterner way that he was by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech) or the Cabinet War Rooms, every interior is bathed in heavy shadows.
(See: The King's Speech or this year's Victoria and Abdul.)
The King’s Speech, maligned as it’s been, was the better film.
In much the same way that “Lincoln” has made many of us believe that’s what Abraham Lincoln was really like, thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance, Oldman pulls off the trick here.
Like Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), Darkest Hour focuses on a time of great political trial for its subject, the better to expose his leadership's essence.
By focusing on one month of Churchill’s life, Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) is very much working in the mold here of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.
Much like Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln , Oldman is the film front to back, taking center stage and never leaving it until the final bow.
Oldman has described Churchill is one of history’s indispensable men, and the movie has echoes of Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln , whose subject was just as indispensable to the resolution of America’s own great moral and military crisis.
But this performance is more than a skin-deep portrayal; it is a full-bodied portrait, and it’s another likely best-actor trophy-taker that reminded me of Ben Kingsley’s turn in “Gandhi.”
Directed by Joe Wright, who visited this era to memorable effect in “Atonement,” “Darkest Hour” deals with the brief span between Churchill’s appointment as prime minister and the fall of France in World War II.
With Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina, and now Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright has established himself as a master of period pieces.
In Joe Wright’s 2007 film “Atonement,” his five-minute tracking shot of troops stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk encompasses the drama and magnitude of the event.
It’s an extremely well-crafted period piece, with an information-rich script by Anthony McCarten and quiet, understated direction by Joe Wright (who handled Dunkirk a bit more showily in 2007’s “Atonement”).
But Oldman so disappears into the character, with the help of untold pounds of prosthetics and padding, it’s as though director Joe Wright (“Atonement”) discovered a brilliant, portly, 60-something actor just walking about the streets of London.
Until this year, perhaps the greatest piece of moviemaking about Dunkirk was only part of a movie: It was a breathtaking sequence of the massive World War II evacuation, filmed in one astonishing five-minute take that dramatically punctuated the movie “Atonement,” directed by Joe Wright.
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In many ways it’s an old-fashioned film in its construction; indeed, the few times when director Joe Wright ( Atonement, Pan ) breaks with the usual subdued camera aesthetic – once when tracking a bomb down from a plane ala Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor , another pulling up from Churchill in rooftop reverie until we see London arrayed around him – rather shatter the immersion, they’re so jarring.
What if it was John Voight and Pearl Harbor is part of the Dunkirkverse??? Darkest Hour could also connect to The King’s Speech but they’ve recast Ben Mendelsohn in the Colin Firth role.
If anything, though, this writer thought less of Churchill through the film and more of Jon Voight’s camp-classic performance as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Pearl Harbor .
In 1988, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ presented a very modern Nazarene wracked with anguish about whether he could carry on with his duty, delivering a casual, vernacular Sermon on the Mount from a dusty slope scarcely more elevated than a pitcher’s mound.
Aprovechar todos estos aspectos para crear un Churchill como no se había visto en el cine –en la pantalla chica nombres como Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm), Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm) y más recientemente John Lithgow (The Crown) han hecho trabajos sobresalientes y galardonados–.
There have been depictions of Churchill in wartime before, most recently Brendan Gleeson in an Emmy-winning performance in 2009’s HBO movie Into the Storm .
For Darkest Hour, he emulates Churchill’s speech so perfectly, it’s one of those rare moments in cinema history, up there with Jamie Foxx’s performance in Ray.
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( The Last King of Scotland and The Iron Lady come to mind.)
The Iron Lady (2011) approached Margaret Thatcher via the Alzheimer’s disease she suffered in her final years.
With Kristin Scott Thomas as wife Clementine, Ben Mendelsohn as King George VI and Lily James as just-hired secretary Elizabeth Layton, Darkest Hour has just as much for fans of The Crown as lovers of The Cruel Sea.