Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour (2018) is a companion piece to Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, both films released about the same time.  Both pictures are radical in conception.  Nolan's Dunkirk uses different time scales cross-cut to imply simultaneity when, in fact, the film shows us explicitly that the events occur within wildly different systems of duration -- the pilot's war is only two hours long while the infantryman's travails last several days.  Darkest Hour obsessively materializes the film's title -- the movie is shot almost completely in gloomy shadow:  Churchill speaks to parliament gathered in a black well dark as a cistern; when he goes among the people, he descends to the gloomy underground, boarding a subway, and the edges of the frame are sooty, forming a black oval around the people in the train car; King Edward's chambers are drowned in darkness and, sometimes, Churchill himself is envisioned as occupying a little rectangle of Rembrandt-brown color in the midst of impenetrable darkness, a postage stamp-sized zone of faint light.  Most of the film is set in subterranean quarters, the War Rooms, buried under London and, whenever, anyone goes abroad, the weather is leaden, grey, and rainy.  The only exception to this principle of blackness is a couple scenes showing aerial bombardment -- orange flames flaring against the black and the ill-weather civilian rescue of the troops at Dunkirk, also composed in somber, monochrome.  I know of no picture as universally black as this film except some of the early half-experimental films of David Lynch -- Eraserhead was similarly dark as was The Elephant Man.

Darkest Hour is exceptionally well-made and effectively directed by Joe Wright.  Gary Oldman's performance as Churchill is suitably majestic.  The picture inexorably captures the darkness growing about Churchill beleaguered by a cabinet that insists that he sue for piece with Hitler.  Further, the film equates this darkness with Churchill's periodic bouts with severe depression.  The movie contains several of Churchill's most famous speeches from the era including "blood, sweat, toil, and tears" and "we will fight on the beaches..."  At the end of the movie, as Parliament wildly embraces Churchill's rejection of peace initiatives, Neville Chamberlain laments that he "has mobilized the English language for war."  And this response points to a moral difficulty that is intrinsic to the film and one that the motion picture doesn't really try to solve.  Churchill's rhetoric is courageous, brilliant, and stirring, but isn't there something a wee bit problematic about the premise:  who knows what a negotiated peace with Hitler would have looked like in May 1940?  And isn't peace always preferable to war?  It's easy to stir people to war.  We've seen this task accomplished with almost no effort in this country post 9 -11.  In fact, it's pretty easy to get a consensus that torturing enemy terrorists is perfectly okay -- just ask the commuter in the subway.  In the film, Churchill takes the psychic temperature of his people by riding in a subway car and asking them rhetorical questions about whether they wish to surrender to Hitler.  Of course, if the question is posed in that way, you can always mobilize the man on the street to join the crusade.  In this country, most everyone was in favor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until, suddenly, they weren't.  In fact, every nation enters into war with high hopes of an easy and glorious triumph over evil, subhuman and savage enemies.  But when the boys start coming home in body-bags, the issues suddenly become much more intricate.  Darkest Hour is about a politician steadfastly, stubbornly, and effectively pulling all of the levers of power to urge continued warfare.  Further, the film argues that the man who compromises the least, who remains the most dogmatically true to his principles, will prevail and, indeed, earn everlasting fame.  But, in fact, isn't our current political system in the United States a victim of ideologies that insist that no compromise is possible and that political purity is the only real measure by which a statesman must be measured?  Fundamentally, war is easy; making peace is hard.  And Darkest Hour celebrates uncompromising belligerence as virtue -- "doubling down" on enmity, a strategy in which our present president excels.  Churchill's  war ended with the Soviet Union in ascendancy over half of Europe with many ancient and noble nations under the heel of Communist dictatorship for half a century.  Was this a good outcome to the Great Crusade?  Everything in Darkest Hour collaborates to enforce the impression of the alcoholic and flawed Churchill's greatness -- and there can be no quarrel with the notion that Churchill was a great man.  But were his speeches stirring the British people to a willingness to "die choked in their own blood" before compromising with the enemy all that different from Hitler's harangues, particularly those that he made at the end of the War, summoning the German people to sacrifice themselves en masse in suicidal defense of the homeland?  Didn't Hitler equally mobilize the German language for war?  Is mobilizing any language to make war a good thing?