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The filmmaker made it seem as if Gary Oldman were playing the pieces because the camera shots would not shy from his fingers. I speculated that perhaps he was fingering random notes and a professional played over the scene. Gary Oldman did, in fact, learn how to play the piano for this film in order for those scenes to be authentic, but a few professionals4 actually played the pieces—Murray Perahia and Emanuel Ax—for the film.
This looks like a great movie, and I hate to nitpick, but I don't think his portrayal of Churchill getting highly excited and shouting like that looks accurate. The recording of the 'fight on the beaches' speech shows that he was much more under-stated when he made his speeches, and that that is what gave them some of their impact, and the quotes about putting your head in the tiger's mouth etc. were almost certainly made without the yelling.
It's a shame that they felt that passion could only be demonstrated by shouting.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
This looks like a great movie, and I hate to nitpick, but I don't think his portrayal of Churchill getting highly excited and shouting like that looks accurate. The recording of the 'fight on the beaches' speech shows that he was much more under-stated when he made his speeches, and that that is what gave them some of their impact, and the quotes about putting your head in the tiger's mouth etc. were almost certainly made without the yelling.
It's a shame that they felt that passion could only be demonstrated by shouting.
If you're right, it is certainly not a nitpik.
I've heard recordings of some of Churchill's speeches (can't remember which, except for his unforgettable "Never give up, never, never . . .) and his power lay in the gruff rumbling low-key quality. Shouting his words cheapens that.
I wonder why they did it. Oldman's acting chops certainly are up to duplicating Churchill's delivery.
1. Oldman didn't want to try and do a Churchill impersonation, and worried that it would end up looking like a comedy turn. There have been a few of these over the years. This is understandable, but not exactly brave from an artistic perspective.
2. They wanted to spice it up for the modern audience, i.e. morons. IMHO this is unacceptable.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
They wanted to spice it up for the modern audience, i.e. morons. IMHO this is unacceptable.
Does he show a sincere desire to protect our environment?
Does he believe gender is a private matter?
If not get ready for those statues to start coming down.
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
One review:http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-oldman-churchill/article/2010779
Quote:
Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an emotional crisis due to the political maneuverings against him and the enormousness of the challenge he faced as the Nazis bore down on Britain’s army in France. Smith is right. Nothing in the historical record supports the idea that Churchill faltered internally in his determination to face down the Nazi menace and achieve victory against Hitler.
But screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director Joe Wright are up to something interesting here that only becomes fully clear at the end. Their use of Churchill, as essayed by Gary Oldman in one of the juiciest performances you will ever be privileged to watch, isn’t biographical. It’s metaphorical. The Churchill we see here may have the familiar jowly countenance, the indelible plummy accent, the singular wit, and the soulful romanticism of the one-of-a-kind original. But Darkest Hour isn’t really about him at all, notwithstanding the fact that Oldman is onscreen nearly every moment and gives an old-fashioned, right-downstage-hogging-the-spotlight, hammy, glorious, barn-burner of a turn that makes you want to shout “bravo” and toss bouquets at the screen.
No, Darkest Hour is the story of how, after he at last ascended to the top of the greasy pole, Winston Churchill came to embody and represent the iron soul of Great Britain at its moment of utter existential peril. The movie’s portrait of a journey taken by Churchill from uncertainty to resolve may be factitious, but if you take it as a portrait of the stiffening of Britain’s spine, it speaks a truth.
Darkest Hour is taken pretty directly from John Lukacs’s wonderful 1999 book Five Days in London (I sure hope Lukacs, still alive and kicking at 93, got some money out of it). As in the Lukacs book, the primary conflict isn’t with Germany but with members of Churchill’s own Tory party, led by the sniffy Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane). The conflicts are both political and practical.
Politically, the old guard is suspicious and disdainful of Churchill, who had left the Tory party, rejoined it (“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat,” he had said), and by the 1930s was speaking powerfully against the Tory embrace of the appeasement of Hitler. Practically, Halifax and his allies are defeatist, viewing the German march through Western Europe as an unstoppable force and a separate peace with Hitler as the only hope for Britain’s survival.
They want to maneuver Churchill into saying explicitly that he will not enter into negotiations with Germany so that they can call a vote of no confidence, kick him out of 10 Downing Street, and put in Halifax instead. Yes, this is a movie in which you know who the bad guys are because they want “peace talks.” (I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.)
This is all taking place against the backdrop of the disastrous situation of the British Expeditionary Force in France, whose hundreds of thousands of men had been pushed back to the beach at Dunkirk (you may recall an earlier film this year on that topic). Efforts to fight until the end are likely to mean the wholesale capture and destruction of Britain’s armed forces, which will not only knock Britain out of the war entirely but leave the Isles largely defenseless. But, as Churchill rages, “you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
This is where the movie takes the turn for which Smith scolds it. Oldman’s Churchill finds himself undone by the burdens of power. Halifax’s implacable hostility and the situation in France cause Churchill to lose his blustering self-confidence. He is on the verge of a nervous collapse. Infected by the doubts and pessimism of his war cabinet, unable to see a way out of the thicket, and haunted by the loss of 4,000 men in Calais whom he used as a diversion to keep the Germans from attacking Dunkirk, Churchill begins to entertain the necessity of trying to reason with the tiger.
His strength is only renewed by encounters with Britons both high and low. A previously unfriendly King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn, a superb actor like Oldman seemingly capable of playing anyone from any nation of any class) visits Churchill late at night in his bedchamber after being forced to contemplate the royal family’s evacuation from Britain, and promises the prime minister his support. George tells him to “go to the people” for inspiration. Churchill decides to descend into the London Underground and ask the common folk what they think—should they fight to the end? Man, woman, and child, they tell him yes.
Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour butchers history to make the British prime minister a much less decisive figure than he actually was.
Because an irresolute and small-minded age applies its own neuroses backward to history, because actors love to portray internal torment, and because we fancy ourselves so sophisticated that we know the official story of the past to be a ruse, movies about important historical figures have become less inspiring and “more human,” at times even iconoclastic. 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. The Queen (2006) depicted a matter-of-fact Elizabeth II who fixed car engines. The Iron Lady (2011) approached Margaret Thatcher via the Alzheimer’s disease she suffered in her final years. Lincoln (2012) reconceived the most revered orator in American history as a quizzical figure speaking in a high-pitched, soft rasp.
Now it’s Churchill’s turn to be shrunken down to a more manageable size. In Darkest Hour, which is set across May and June of 1940, the English director Joe Wright and his star Gary Oldman conspire to create a somewhat comical, quavering, and very human prime minister. In dramatic terms it’s an engaging picture, and Oldman is terrifically appealing, but if you’re looking for indecision and angst, the person of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is a curious place to declare you’ve found it.
Darkest Hour begins with the resignation of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) and Churchill’s accession to the premiership on May 10, 1940, building up to the concluding “We shall fight on the beaches” speech he delivered in the House of Commons on June 4, after the miraculous Dunkirk rescue. (The flight of British forces from the Continent takes place almost entirely offscreen here but has been covered in another movie this year. It also inspired a memorable interlude, captured in one of the most elaborate continuous shots ever put to film, in Wright’s own 2007 movie Atonement).
Introduced to us as a kind of rumpled, absent-minded professor with an alarming predilection for drink and a habit of terrifying his secretary (Lily James), Oldman’s Churchill is alternately funny, disarming, wheedling, and unsettled by events in Europe and Washington, from which in a dismal phone call Franklin Roosevelt is heard informing him that the United States cannot by law come to Britain’s rescue. Churchill insists he must at least have the ships he bought: “We paid for them . . . with the money that we borrowed from you.” Yet Roosevelt’s hands are tied. “Just can’t swing it,” he says. Britain must stand alone
Such moments capture the sense of a Britain gasping for air as Hitler’s fingers tightened their grip around its neck. But then, in its last half-hour, Darkest Hour veers far off the path of truth. Screenwriter Anthony McCarten has claimed, citing Cabinet minutes, that Churchill’s intentions changed virtually from “hour to hour,” and “this is not something that’s ever been celebrated — that he had doubts, that he was uncertain.” All of this is a gross exaggeration. Churchill told his War Cabinet on May 28 “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” I understand the needs of Method actors, but Churchill was not George McFly.
Hectored by a combination of Chamberlain and his fellow appeaser, Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), the prime minister is shown as nearly ready to give in and sue for peace through Mussolini. Buckling under pressure, he rediscovers his resolve only because of last-minute pep talks from his wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn). The clincher is that traffic halts the premier’s car and he is forced to take the Underground to Parliament.
Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten would have us believe that the ghostwriters of the immortal speech to follow were random Londoners Churchill met on that train, where they gave him both courage and some of the actual words he later used. But these events did not occur; the only time Churchill ever rode the Underground was during the general strike of 1926, according to his biographers William Manchester and Paul Reid. To suggest otherwise trivializes Churchill’s defining speech by reducing it to the level of stenography, while completely misstating the direction of wartime inspiration. Churchill was nothing like the people’s puppet. He felt he was born to lead them. As he would later write, “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. . . . I was sure I should not fail.”
It is a cliché of the motion-picture industry that, in order to sufficiently excite audience interest, the climactic moments must incorporate a reversal of direction. Since we all know how this chapter of World War II ends — to give Wright and McCarten credit, it’s a stirring, magnificent scene in which Churchill rouses the nation with the 34-minute address one MP called “the speech of 1,000 years” — Darkest Hour simply imposes its dramatic needs upon the days preceding it. For the sake of a good yarn, it mistakes a lion for a jellyfish.
Just saw it, a must see in book. I can't nit pick it, was gripped, and as far as I'm concerned it is a unique opportunity for most to understand Churchill and the desperation of the times. I've read many biographies on Churchill and the letters between him and Roosevelt and while this is in some ways a different cut, it's better than most movies I've seen this year period.