'Darkest Hour' Loves Churchill, But Let's Hope It Tanks His Legacy

​Joe Wright's blustery Churchill biopic "Darkest Hour" is not going to win Best Picture. GoldDerby currently has it at 100/1 odds. Two modest nominations save it from tying with "Phantom Thread" for dead last in FiveThirtyEight's guild- and critic-awards driven model. It even has the weakest Rotten Tomatoes rating, for whatever that's worth. It will lose. If I'm wrong, I pledge to eat one of Winston Churchill's silly homburg hats.

All that said, it's virtually certain that Gary Oldman will win Best Actor for his portrayal of Churchill, which is a shame for so many reasons. It's not just that "Darkest Hour" is far from Oldman's best work — rewarding him in the year of #MeToo given past allegations of domestic abuse (on top of some hastily apologized-for anti-Semitic remarks) would be a clear misread on Academy voters' part.

The other reason Oldman shouldn't win Best Actor has everything to do with Winston Churchill's legacy and "Darkest Hour's" profound mishandling of its subject. There's a good movie about Churchill buried somewhere in "Darkest Hour," but that hypothetical gem would be something the film isn't: a satire.

Oldman Would've Made A Perfect Churchill-As-Oaf

Oldman's physical performance throughout is a believably fumbling cross between the statesman-like and crass. He's far better-suited to the moments where Churchill screws up than in those where the audience is supposed to go "he's right about the Nazis, damn it!" It is so, so easy to tweak the history and push the buttons that put us on Churchill's side because duh, of course the Nazis can't be reasoned with. Oldman gives the serious scenes his choleric mumbly-shouty all, but shots of him walking with a slight forward pitch — not unlike Anthony Atamanuik's Trump impression — paint a far more interesting picture than any damn-the-fascists speech could, real or invented.

When Churchill meets with King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) to accept the Prime Minister role, their talk is terse and awkward. In a genuinely funny move, Churchill sheepishly walks backwards out of room while under George's gaze. Here's a moment that makes Churchill seem genuinely small and uncertain. Before the meeting, George rushes through a list of Churchill's past blunders before coming around to his dogged opposition to the Nazis. George, skeptical, says "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" — an appropriate quip about Churchill's stand after the war was won, but as a preamble it only serves to cast him as a prophetic underdog. All the moments of doubt that Wright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten pepper throughout the film are only there to help them build Churchill up again by the film's end.

Moments like these could've been better employed in a film set on taking Churchill's reputation apart, at least when paired with Oldman's take on the role. The humorous moments are there in the film, they work… and then they're immediately trampled on by whatever the next "important" scene is. The gradual accumulation of quirk also has the reverse effect of making some of the more conventionally stirring scenes unintentionally comic; applause for Churchill's speeches becomes unearned, goodwill he nets seems disingenuous.

The Underground Scene Tilts Right Into Self-Parody

No scene better illustrates the film's internal messiness than Churchill's spur-of-the-moment ride on the London Underground. With British infantry trapped at Dunkirk and Neville Chamberlain threatening to challenge his role as PM, Churchill has to decisively settle whether peace talks are an option — so he goes to "the people."

Though not entirely without basis in fact, Churchill's public transit jaunt in "Darkest Hour" rings utterly false. After some wide-eyed silence followed by an all-smiles and handshakes meet-n-greet, Churchill asks the passengers how they feel about the war with Germany. Everyone he polls is vehemently opposed to the proposition of peace talks, including Marcus Peters (Ade Haastrup as the only black character with a speaking role) and, most cloyingly, a little girl (Bronte Carmichael, credited just as "Young Girl on Train"). "The people," as constructed here, are entirely certain that war is the right path, and the mood is so buoyant you almost expect Oldman to follow it all up with a Gene Wilder-as-Willy-Wonka somersault.

The Underground scene carelessly paves over any public apprehension about the war and paints Churchill as a populist with the broadest possible brush. It's so absurd it almost feels self-aware, like it knows it's giving us no good reason to believe Churchill gives a fig how ordinary folks feel about the war (let alone anyone who's not a white male). A few winks and nods could've locked down that feeling, but no — this is the scene that'll catapult us straight through to Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech.

It's Not An Anti-Trump Or Anti-Fascist Movie. It's Barely A 'Nazis Were Bad' Movie

Wright has publicly expressed he believes "Darkest Hour" has the makings of an anti-Trump statement in it because Churchill exhibits doubts, a trait that admittedly seems hard to find in Trump. That said, pointing out that Churchill thought a lot about how to best respond to the Nazi menace doesn't stand out as more noble than just knowing they're a threat. After all, isn't that how the people in the Underground feel, even though they have less information than Churchill?

"Darkest Hour" is constructed around Churchill's early speeches as Prime Minister and culminates with "We shall fight on the beaches" because those words are the right ones to use if you're arguing that he was vehemently anti-fascist. You can't argue that point with the words Churchill had for Indians in 1943 — that "they are a beastly people with a beastly religion." You can't argue that point with the supremacist leanings evident in calling whites a "stronger race, a higher-grade race." To argue Churchill's moral supremacy you have to leave all his ills out, and focus on a narrow band of time. The slice "Darkest Hour" relates is actually Churchill's brightest, and that's to the film's detriment. If you try to pull anything out of the film beyond "Churchill was right to oppose Hitler," you'll come up empty handed, because it has nothing universal to say about populist leadership or the dangers of fascism.

A film that set out to dismantle the myth of Churchill could have made statements on that level. Each moment of humor, every tic of Oldman's performance could've been leveraged to refract the entirety of Churchill's life and efforts through the events of May 1940. As it is, "Darkest Hour" is content to focus just on how Churchill happened to be right in that stopped clock moment — the film doesn't care about how Gallipoli or the Bengal famine should inform our understanding of the man. It separates his best words from the insufferable, nigh-inexhaustible list of quotations attributed to him while still keeping them at a remove from his worst acts.

Perhaps it's appropriate that a Best Actor win for Oldman will raise the question of how severe the allegations or public instances of misconduct have to be before Academy voters withhold their forgiveness en masse. I'm not alone in saying I'd very much like to be wrong about Oldman's claim to the award. The odds of Oldman losing are better than the odds of "Darkest Hour" taking Best Picture (which is why I won't be eating homburg if, say, Timothée Chalamet wins). Oldman keeps "Darkest Hour" interesting, but he could not hope to fix the hole at the heart of its script: in considering Churchill's capacity for doubt, the film never doubts its own aim to redeem him.

The film ends with a pithy quote about Churchill, attributed spottily and here delivered by Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane): "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." As a statement on Churchill's oratory ability and not his morals, fair enough. Notably, "Darkest Hour" did not receive an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.

In the lead up to the 2018 Oscars, we're taking a closer look at each of the Best Picture nominees.​ Read our previous entries:

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Is 'The Post' A Sign That Oscars-Bait Movies Need To Die?

How Can A Film With The Pedigree Of 'Phantom Thread' Be An Oscars Dark Horse?

Will The 'Three Billboards' Backlash Make It This Year's 'La La Land'?

Does 'Lady Bird's Best Picture Nomination Represent A Breakthrough For Female Directors?

Would A Best Picture Win For 'Call Me By Your Name' Be An Authentic Victory For LGBT Cinema?