Darkest Hour review: Gary Oldman's Churchill will galvanise the nation

Dir: Joe Wright; Starring: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane, Ben Mendelsohn. PG cert, 125 mins.

Some casting choices just sell themselves, and Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill is one of them. Firstly because on paper, the star attraction in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour makes so much sense: who wouldn’t want to see the Nazis taken to task by George Smiley, Count Dracula and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg?

And then in the flesh, it very tantalisingly doesn’t make sense, which makes it more appealing still. How on earth could Oldman, wily and canine, with a bent for sinew-stiffening rage, ever hope to convince as the stocky, stoical wartime PM? 

The full answer involves padding, wigs and facial prosthetics, which are every bit as impressive and invisible in Wright’s film as you have probably already read.

But it comes down first to the sheer electric immediacy of Oldman’s on-camera charisma. His Churchill is a famous figure made wincingly real and raw – an unlikely cousin, or perhaps unlikelier ancestor, of his Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and his Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. 

As with those two career-defining performances – Churchill is unquestionably another – Oldman does not go in for straight impersonation.

Nor does he “disappear into the role”, to roll out a familiar awards-season compliment. His trademark glint in the eye and subtly upturned smirk are there for all to see, even as the familiar voice and body language, both by turns spry and galumphing, have you utterly convinced you’re watching someone else.

What he does is take an icon and metabolise him, and his performance – which won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a Bafta earlier this week – is an amazement and a delight.

It is also unquestionably the big selling point of Wright’s period political thriller, although the film has more up its charcoal-grey sleeve.

It plays out over the first three and a half blustery weeks of Churchill’s premiership in May and June of 1940, with sedition brewing in Westminster and Hitler’s army tearing across Europe.

The freshly deposed Neville Chamberlain and his ally Viscount Halifax (Ronald Pickup and Stephen Dillane, both terrific) are hellbent on peace talks with Hitler, brokered by Mussolini: capitulation dressed up as statesmanship.

In reality Chamberlain’s position was more nuanced, but screenwriter Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything) frames the pair as a furtive, Iago-like double act, with whom Churchill clashes in a series of riveting confrontations in the War Rooms under Whitehall.

The sense that history has hit a critical point is stark.

Wright allows these talky sequences to patiently play out, withholding his trademark flamboyance for other times – such as the moment when Churchill settles down to give his radio address and the on-air bulb lights with a ping, painting the entire room blood red.

Having memorably recreated the beaches of Dunkirk in his 2007 film Atonement, Wright perhaps wisely doesn’t make a return trip– also, you sense Christopher Nolan has that covered for the foreseeable future – and sticks for the most part to tense interiors.

Holding the audience’s hand in this claustrophobic, part-subterranean realm is Elizabeth Layton (Lily James), Churchill’s new secretary.

She takes up her post as the film begins, and we meet the great man in the same condition she does, propped up in bed in salmon-pink pyjamas, with his cooked breakfast on a tray and the room already filling with cigar smoke.

It is Elizabeth, with initial moral support from Churchill’s wife Clemmie (a Bafta-nominated Kristin Scott-Thomas) who diligently takes down the three now-legendary speeches around which the film is built.

The first is her boss’s maiden performance as Prime Minister in the Commons, then his “Be ye men of valour” broadcast to the nation as the Germans swept through France, and lastly his response to the Dunkirk evacuation, again in the Commons – the famous climax of which, beginning “We shall fight on the beaches”, Oldman plays like the guitar solo in a stadium gig. 

In the Brexit-consumed present, it makes tactical sense for Darkest Hour not to presume to offer an overt political lesson for our time: you can’t imagine Universal liking the idea of either 52 or 48 percent of the audience trooping out of the cinema feeling like they’d had their noses tweaked.

But it is bracingly forthright on the value and function of strong leadership in a crisis, and ably demonstrates what it can achieve, for those of us who can barely remember what it looks or sounds like.

Oldman’s performance really does have the power to galvanise a nation, and as he talks you feel the words swelling in your chest.

“He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle,” one MP remarks: a spot-on observation the film borrows from the American newscaster Edward R Murrow.

The script takes one outrageous liberty: towards the end, there is an entirely fictional sequence in which Churchill abandons his chauffeur-driven car and darts down into the London Underground, where he joshes and consults with an impromptu focus group of earnest (and starstruck) working-class types.

Your inner critic tuts, but you also can’t help but admire the cheek of it. Wright’s film blows away the starch and stuffiness: it’s an open window on an all-too-recent past we can’t forget.