Thanks, I Hate It: Darkest Hour

Were I to pick historical figures most deserving of cinematic rehabilitation, Winston Churchill wouldn't exactly have been at the top of the list. Wife beater Gary Oldman probably wouldn't have been my pick to play him either, but that's neither here nor there. What really matters is the film itself, a treacly splatter of nostalgia for a man who terrorized India and once, while serving as London's fire chief, allowed a building to burn to the ground with people inside it to satisfy a political vendetta. Darkest Hour is sentimental in all the worst ways, refusing at every turn to really look at its subject or its moment in history, indulging in caricature, and actively avoiding controversy.

Oldman's best actor win for his turn as Churchill is befuddling when set against his much more nuanced and compelling role as soft-spoken spymaster George Smiley in 2011's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Hell, it's befuddling when set against his performance as fucking Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. It consists of little more than Oldman delivering mush-mouthed tirades while draped in a suety, sallow fat suit. He berates secretaries, bumbles through meetings with the admiralty, and mumbles self-important thank-yous to his adoring and understanding family. Nowhere is there any glimpse of Churchill's humanity, of his cruel wit or crippling dependence on alcohol. All insight ends at the lighthearted humor with which the film treats his drunk-uncleish obnoxiousness.

Director Joe Wright has some sense of what exactly wartime London has to offer in terms of visual flair. His deep shadows and buttery golds in the House of Commons are, if not exactly groundbreaking, admirably Godfather-ish, but elsewhere it's prestige green-blue all the way to the bank, settings rustic, industrial, and grandiose alike reduced to impersonal smears of astroturf. The bombing scenes are sterile playhouse renditions of war, an interesting depiction of violence from the perspective of the powerful without thoughtful film-making or a strong script to support it. If you're inclined to give Wright the benefit of the doubt, I'd beg you to consider the near-climactic scene set in the London underground.

Slipping his handlers, Churchill takes the underground to Parliament to mix with the common people and hear what they have to say about the war. It's pretty embarrassing to start with, working-class people (one of them is black!) regurgitating the kind of plain-spoken wisdom someone who's never spoken to a working-class person imagines we spout. Then a very small child tells him to keep going until he's got Hitler's spine, and he cries and dabs at his eyes with a little hankie. It's revolting in the extreme, a spectacle of uncertain nobility finding solace, adoration, and support in the undermenschen who toil below them. 

That there are people who love their overlords is, of course, a reality, but for such a high-profile film to traffic so uncritically in depicting it feels ugly in a way that's hard to define. That the context in which it occurs is a child's endorsement of war is an active perversion of fiction's power to make us uncomfortable with our lives and beliefs, a soothing pat on the head from Big Brother that carnage is fine, that the tyrants have got it all figured out, that bravery means industrialized murder. The idea that our leaders need our emotional support is a sick joke. All they need are bent backs strong enough to stand on.