Darkest Hour turns on a single question: whether Winston Churchill will talk to Adolf Hitler. Joe Wright’s film stays in May 1940, and it keeps its camera close to the man who has to answer.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Churchill Takes the Job Nobody Wants
The setup is a leadership crisis, not a battle. In May 1940, the Labour Party in Parliament demands Neville Chamberlain resign as prime minister, saying he is too weak against the Nazi onslaught. Conservative colleagues want Lord Halifax to replace him. Halifax does not feel it is his time. Chamberlain picks the one man the opposition will accept to lead a national government: Churchill.
Churchill had predicted the danger from Hitler before the war. Anthony McCarten’s script treats that fact as the whole engine of the movie. Gary Oldman plays Churchill, and the film follows him from a bad first morning to the speech that decides the war’s direction.
King George VI, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is sceptical of Churchill because of his actions during the abdication crisis. He invites him to form a government anyway. Churchill brings Chamberlain in as Lord President of the Council and Halifax in as Foreign Secretary. Parliament reacts coolly to his first speech promising “Blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Halifax and Chamberlain Plan Their Exit
Chamberlain, played by Ronald Pickup, and Halifax, played by Stephen Dillane, are appalled by Churchill’s refusal to negotiate for peace. Their plan is procedural and patient. They will resign from the government, force a vote of no confidence, and create the situation in which Halifax would likely become prime minister.
That is the real threat in Darkest Hour. Not the German army, which the film mostly keeps off screen. The threat is a war cabinet that would rather settle than fight. Churchill’s majority is not the question. His cabinet is.
Wright stages the pressure as a series of rooms. Churchill visits French prime minister Paul Reynaud, who thinks Churchill is delusional for not admitting the Allies are losing the Battle of France. Churchill is furious that the French have no plan to counterattack. US president Franklin Roosevelt is sympathetic but limited by an isolationist Congress and the Neutrality Acts. David Strathairn provides Roosevelt’s voice, heard on a telephone call with Churchill.
Lily James and the Typewriter
Lily James plays Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s new secretary. Their first scene together is a rebuke: Churchill is brusque with her for mishearing him, and Clementine Churchill, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, tells him off for it. The film uses Layton as its audience, someone learning to read a man everyone else has already decided about.
It is the most effective choice in the movie. Oldman’s Churchill needs someone in the room who is not a rival, not a king, not a general. Layton gives him that, and James plays her without sentiment. The film does not pretend the arrangement is warm. It is work.
Never give up. Never give in.
A Radio Address That Backfires
Churchill draws anger from his cabinet and advisers for a radio address in which he falsely implies the Allies are advancing in France. The film treats this as a low point, and it should. Whatever else Darkest Hour is doing, it is not selling Churchill as a man who told the truth at all times. He told the country what it needed to hear, and the people around him knew it was not true.
The rest of the cast fills out the machinery of government. Samuel West is Sir Anthony Eden. Nicholas Jones is Sir John Simon. David Schofield is Clement Atlee. Richard Lumsden is General Ismay, and Malcolm Storry is General Ironside. Hilton McRae is Arthur Greenwood. The film has a lot of men in a lot of rooms, and it trusts the audience to keep up.
The Schedule That Shaped the Release
Darkest Hour premiered at the 44th Telluride Film Festival on 1 September 2017. Its rollout was slow and deliberate, the kind a studio gives a film it expects to be talked about for months.
| Date | Release |
|---|---|
| 1 September 2017 | World premiere, 44th Telluride Film Festival |
| 22 November 2017 | Limited release in the US |
| 22 December 2017 | Wide release |
| 12 January 2018 | Release in the UK |
That pattern worked. The film grossed $150 million worldwide and received positive reviews, with critics calling Oldman’s performance one of the best of his career. It collected Best Actor for Oldman at the Academy Awards, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, and the SAG Awards. The film runs 125 minutes.
Where the Film Is Strongest
Oldman is the reason to watch it, and the reason it holds up. He does not play Churchill as a monument. He plays him as a man who is difficult, vain, and correct about the one thing that mattered. The performance carries the film through its slower stretches, of which there are several.
Wright keeps the camera moving and the rooms tight. The film runs 125 minutes and feels shorter in its middle section, when the cabinet plotting gives the story a clock. It sags when it stops to admire its subject.
The supporting cast is strong enough that the film survives its own reverence. Dillane’s Halifax is the best thing in it after Oldman, because he plays the argument rather than the villain. Halifax does not want to surrender to Hitler out of cowardice. He wants to save what is left of the British Empire, and the film lets him say so. That is what makes Churchill’s refusal land.
What Darkest Hour Does Not Do
The film is a drama and a history, and it is more comfortable as the first. It compresses a war cabinet crisis into a personal duel, and it mostly works because the personal duel is real. But the movie is not interested in the cost of the decision it celebrates. The empire Churchill fought to preserve is named as what is at stake. It is not examined.
The film also avoids the battlefield almost entirely. Germany invades the Low Countries, and we hear about it. We do not see it. That is a legitimate choice for a movie about a man in a room, but it means Darkest Hour asks you to take the stakes on faith. It earns that faith through Oldman, not through spectacle.
The tagline is “Never give up. Never give in.” The film believes it. The film never lets the audience forget what believing it cost.
The Case for Watching It
Darkest Hour is a strong film with a great performance at its center, and it knows the difference. Oldman’s Churchill is the whole case for watching it, and the film builds scenes that let him work. The cabinet intrigue gives the movie its spine. The Layton scenes give it a heart. The radio address gives it a conscience.
What it does not have is a point of view about the empire Churchill was fighting to preserve. The film names the stakes and then looks away. That is the gap between a good historical drama and a great one, and Darkest Hour sits on the good side of it.
The supporting cast is deep, the pacing is steady, and the ending earns its feeling. It is a film about a decision, made well, with one performance doing more than its share of the lifting. That is enough to recommend it, and not quite enough to make it more than that.
Score: 7.5/10 (Metacritic 75/100)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
