‘Darkest Hour’ takes liberties with original material
Hollywood spends a lot of time and money getting the atmospherics right. Take the widely-publicized “Darkest Hour,” about Winston Churchill’s dramatic early days in office during World War II.
The prime minister’s official residence, 10 Downing Street, and the House of Commons look just about right in the movie. The French civilians fleeing the German army are suitably bedraggled. As for the fella portraying former prime minister Neville Chamberlain, well, the man is a dead ringer for the Munich appeaser.
It’s too bad “Darkest Hour” pays so little attention to the real Winston Churchill.
It’s troubling to contemplate some future high school history teacher instructing the uninstructed to watch “Darkest Hour” to get the skinny on Winnie and the Brits as France falls to the Nazis, the British army is on the cusp of annihilation, and western civilization itself faces extermination at the hands of Adolf Hitler.
(Yes, it was that dire. And we think we have problems.)
“Darkest Hour” is junk history, competently acted but otherwise useless. Most of the audience was out of the theater and didn’t read the fine print at the end of the roll: “… some of the material (in the movie) has been fictionalized.”
Some of the material? That’s like saying Hitler found it hard to make friends.
Oh, “Darkest Hour” was fine at the beginning. There was Winston dictating to a young secretary, new to the job. He’s suddenly bellowing at her for having misheard a word. “P P P. The word is ripe.” She thought he had said right. She runs from the room, crying. Churchill was hard on the help.
This exchange, like several others in the movie, seems riped from the pages of William Manchester’s magnificent Churchill biography “The Lion”, three volumes in all, close to 3,000 pages, the last one co-authored by Paul Reid. (Manchester died in 2004. Volume three, “Defender of the Realm”, appeared in 2012.)
Director Joe Wright should have stuck to the book. The truth was plenty dramatic. As Manchester (and more historians than you can throw a book at) know, Churchill was a warrior. Moreover, his former “chief” Chamberlain was rock-solid in the fraught, early days of Churchill’s premiership.
Instead, “Darkest Hour” turns Chamberlain into a back-stabber and Churchill into a befuddled old man “trembling” at the prospect of becoming prime minister, confused and intimidated by colleagues who want His Majesty’s Government to enter into talks with Italy’s Mussolini to end the war with Germany and save Britain from bloody, humiliating defeat.
In the service of this narrative, the movie sends Churchill into the Underground — the London subway — where he encounters the British working class whose patriotic fervor is such that Churchill decides to eschew peace talks and fight “That Man” Hitler.
In this he is aided by his young typist-secretary, a virtuous miss — Elizabeth Layton, a real person — who has lost a brother to Hitler and the war.
She is a wise-beyond-her-years granddaughter-type figure whose moral compass Churchill evidently needs in order to navigate the rough shoals of English party politics and the nasty, conspiratorial figures in opposition to him and British victory.
For good measure, Wright serves up a fatherly monarch who puts some much needed steel into Churchill’s sagging spine. King George V, a patriot in life, turns out, in the movie, to be a sage counseling the prime minister to be strong and brave.
Not even Churchill’s famously soaring oratory is convincing. How can it be when we in the audience know the backstory? Pushed around by Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Halifax, we’re not sure what Churchill believes or thinks. Is he even capable of thought: in the movie Churchill is close to clueless.
The Great Man is entirely submerged in “Darkest Hour.” Churchill’s genius, such as it is, consists of employing Elizabeth Layton and heeding the advice of the common folk he had the good fortune to encounter in the London subway.
Having nothing to say about Chamberlain’s high character or Churchill’s superb leadership during Britain’s “finest hour” (the title, truncated, of one of his wartime memoirs), “Darkest Hour” is a historical mess and a thematic failure
At the close of his first day as prime minister, Churchill went to bed (he later wrote) without the need for “cheering dreams.” Feeling as if he had linked arms with “destiny”, a kind of misty-eyed amalgam of preparation and opportunity, Churchill declared that “facts are better than dreams.”
Director Wright should have listened to Churchill.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@ gmail.com.