The actor Gary Oldman, director Joe Wright, and writer Anthony McCarten have beautifully portrayed a character who's practically a member of my family. Memoirs by and about him lay around our home; Mom and Dad admired him and referred to him often; I went to Winston Churchill Elementary School in Homewood, Illinois, 1966-1969; I lived off of Churchill Rd. in Jackson, MS; the first dog I adopted in my adult life was named Churchill; and my first several years in education were spent finding a way to make Sir Winston's History of the English-Speaking Peoples accessible to 13-year-olds in Mississippi. For my students, I wrote a biography of WSC, alongside biographies of Hitler and FDR. A fifty-pound clay bust of the man, gift from a colleague in Mississippi, still presides over my classroom. I know the subject well.
Winston Churchill in many ways bears comparison to our current U.S. President. I've often observed that WSC was a perpetual adolescent, mischievous, fond of secret strategems, liable to disappear underwater in his bath while he dictated to his secretary. In the movie, he's viewed as erratic, "delusional." In the book, he's also labeled "narcissistic." Unlike the current President, however, he was also voraciously curious and deeply aware of history.
McCarten follows daily events May 1940, but structures the story on three speeches that Sir Winston gave that month. We get to see what goes into each speech through intense encounters with politicians and military advisers. In the first one, his "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech, Churchill proclaims, "Our policy is victory at all costs," but he seems to be spitting into the wind. In the second, a radio address, his upbeat assessment of the situation in France is pronounced "delusional" and he admits to shielding the public from the dark truth of the situation. Things get considerably darker before he gathers his wits and strength for the third speech.
During each of the speeches, we get close-ups of the seething, silent Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and the man Churchill replaced, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), the one who proclaimed that his agreement with Hitler had ensured "peace in our time." Writer McCarten stacks the deck in favor of Lord Halifax, who appeals to common sense regarding Hitler's superior forces, and also tearfully appeals to sympathy for the men who will be sacrificed by Churchill's blithe command to "stop Hitler." Halifax says exactly what we in the audience see: Hitler is invincible, the good guys are powerless, and it's time to save the children and everyone else by making peace with him.
[Photo collage: Actor Gary Oldman, left, and his remarkable transformation into Churchill, lower right. Upper right: Kristin Scott Thomas and Oldman tete a tete as "Clemmy" and "Pig" ]
For a private view of Churchill, the creators of the film give us his interactions with two women, his wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James). Through his private dialogues with them, we see the personal agony and uncertainty as WSC chooses between the certain loss of 4000 men in Calais, the expected loss of 300,000 men in Dunkirk, and the option of coming to terms with Hitler. In scenes between Churchill and Clementine, he calls her "Clemmy" and she calls him "Pig." The two are flirtatious, witty, adolescent, and combative. She sums up his whole life when she recasts his doubts and the many failures in his decades of public life as the very qualities that make him the right leader for the moment.
Typing the man's words, the secretary Layton helps us to appreciate what goes into each of those speeches. Sometimes he rumbles with an avalanche of clauses, and sometimes he rambles, paralyzed by uncertainty. Her own agony over a brother in battle touches Churchill. We also get to see what I'd read about in her real-life account of those times, how he'd give dictation to her from the bathtub and wander around au naturel.
King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) sides with Halifax and Chamberlain early in the film. But, looking out from Buckingham Palace at London blacked-out, the King comes to appreciate Churchill's defiance of Hitler. In a scene meant to contrast his first meeting with Churchill, when Churchill approaches stiffly through a vast Palace hallway for a stiff formal kiss of the King's hand, the King calls on Churchill at home, sitting beside the rumpled Prime Minister in a dark garret where Churchill seems to have retreated, and says, simply, "You have my support."
At the titular "darkest hour," Churchill gathers strength from "the people" and calls the secretary to help him dash together the third speech, one that really did turn the tide. The United Kingdom was unprepared to fight Hitler, but, in a phrase that writer Anthony McCarten borrows from an obituary for WSC in 1965, Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." McCarten writes in his book, "With words, Churchill changed the political mood and shored up the nervous will of a shaking people" (intro, xi). The unexpected defiance of Prime Minister, Parliament, and the public gave Hitler pause, just long enough for WSC and FDR to cobble together a military defense.
It's a lovely movie that made me cry and laugh in equal measure - as did the year 2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment