Darkest Hour movie critique- by Mark Kermode

Full text transcript the Darkest Hour movie critique

Well, the first thing to say is that, you know, you kind of couch that in terms of the of the forthcoming Oscar, incidentally, well done for bringing up the Brian Cox rule. Well done for knowing the Brian Cotlar. You what you.

Well, and so you told me about it. And so I thought it was worth mentioning because he hadn’t he genuinely hadn’t even occurred to him before that.

That’s what you do. You play a role that Brian Cox didn’t win an Oscar for and then you win an Oscar. And funnily enough, I think the first person who said that to me was David Norris projectionist. Yes. Dave Norris some time ago said, well, of course, he’s going to win because of the Brian Cox rule. And according to all the current, you know, ceiling odds, checkers, whatever it is, all that sort of stuff, he is absolutely head of the pack for best actor.

I remember being pretty sure that he was going to win Best Actor back in 2012 when it was Tinker Tailor. And then, of course, he was beaten to The Punch by Jean Dujardin for that role in The Artist. And, you know, there’s this thing about all the stars line up. The moment comes. I love that phrase he used when he said, as an actor, you’re you’re in and out of the Saniya, you know? Well, he’s definitely in the sun at the moment. Everything everything is on because, of course, as we all know, you can’t ever predict awards. They are they are always as a random element.

But I think he looks like he has a very, very strong chance of winning and it’ll be a deserved win because he’s you know, it’s a very good performance. He he’s acting with an awful lot of prosthetics. He’s acting through an awful lot of prosthetic, a lot harder than it than it sounds. I mean, I remember talking to John Hurt in the Isle of Man about working with, you know, the Elephant Man thing. And he said, you can’t believe how hard it is when, you know, you so much of your face is covered by this stuff. And I know that prosthetics have moved on enormously since then. But he is a very, very convincing performance. You believe in the fragility of it. You believe in the sense of determination.

He’s done an interesting thing with the voice, which is that it isn’t quite imitation. It’s you know, you recognize the voice, but it’s also it’s also it’s its own voice. It’s not just somebody doing an impression. I mean, I also should say in this that I really did love Brian Cox playing Churchill. And with Cox, I made that comparison that it was like when Anthony Hopkins played Nixon, they didn’t look anything like him, but he did look like him because it was to do with the way in which he stood, the way in which he moved, all that kind of stuff. And he talked about that in the interview. And I I think it’s you know, it’s the kind of performance that absolutely gets awards attention.

And you can see why I have to say that when he said the thing, you know, in the US, there have been like a thousand reviews and four of them have been bad. That didn’t entirely surprise me. And I’m sorry that I’m going to say that I’m one of the naysayers as far as the film itself is concerned, because I’m not wowed by the film. I think the performance is very, very good. And I think it’s very easy to see why it’s attracting so much attention. But I do have problems with the film itself and they go something like this firstly.

I mean, the the screenplays written by Annie McCartney, who wrote Theory of Everything, which I thought was very, very fine screenplay seems to me to be very much on the nose and very directed towards an audience that it’s telling to keep up to speed. There is stuff like, let’s ask Halifax, the foreign secretary. There is stuff like he’s never forgiven me for, you know, for allowing the marriage to Wallis Simpson. The the the bit which tells you the thing, which, you know, in that you wouldn’t say when you were in the same room with somebody, but you do anyway.

There’s also an awful lot of rhubarb being in the background while people have important discussions. I know that the those scenes you have of the political meetings, they are naturally theatrical, but I think there’s theatrical rhubarb and then there’s cinematic rhubarb. And I think in this particular area we’re in the theatrical rhubarb thing. And then there is one particular scene, and I know that, you know, you and I have talked about this briefly in which effectively at a crucial moment in the drama, suddenly a sort of mini referendum is held by going out of focus group on the cheap little focus group on the tube, which which is a scene that I have heard described as having an emotional, if not actual truth, but seemed to me true then it seemed to me to be utterly proposed.

I mean, the argument is that there are that there are precedents for it and that there, you know, whatever. But here’s the key thing. The key thing is that the way that scene plays just felt completely and utterly out of place and artificial. And it just I I was really sort of stumped by it because it just stopped the drama dead in its tracks for me. And I just thought I just cannot get on board with this. And I found it very difficult to get back on board with it afterwards. So I think that one of the things that I mean, it’s interesting because we’ve had so much there has been a lot of stuff about Dunkirk and some, you know, obviously.

All right, who made atonement did that extraordinary beach scene before in Atonement, and then just in last year, we had their finest, which is their finest and darkest hour at their finest, darkest hour should be a sort of double bill. And of course, we had Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. And then in the Churchill film, we had, you know, anxiety about leading up to the D-Day landings in the Brian Cox film. In the case of this, I didn’t feel that I was particularly being told anything radically new, but I did feel that what Joe Wright was doing was trying very, very hard to inject a sense of immediacy and urgency into it to prevent it from ever becoming like stuffy meetings in rooms with, you know, people shouting at each other.

And I have to give him credit that he did do that. I mean, it felt like a movie that cracking along at a dramatic pace, but with that sense of cracking along with dramatic grace was also, for me, a sense of artifice, a sense that what you were seeing was something that was playing out in a very, very explanatory, very, very expository way that was being played almost like a play. Now, there is no question that the film is finding its audience, because I’ve heard, you know, very, very positive responses to it.

And he’s as he was saying in terms of the reviews from America, and I don’t want to undermine my admiration for Gary Oldman performance, but I I think the film itself is flawed. I think the film itself trips along with a certain degree of cliche. I think it tells a gripping story in a way which feels dramatically urgent, but at the same time is doing that feels like what it’s done to make it dramatically urgent is taken dramatic liberties that that don’t work for me. And that I what I never I never I never 100 percent believed in it. And that was that.

I never 100 percent did that thing that you need to do when you’re completely immersed in a film, which I believe I’m in the room with those people. Well, I felt that I was watching was a dramatized version of those events, sometimes very well dramatized. You know, I think that Joe Right. Is a he’s a technically good director, although I have felt emotionally distant from some of his friends from which I didn’t, which I really, really liked. I wasn’t a huge fan of Atonement. And that, as we know, was a very successful movie and did very well. I always felt distanced from it.

And I think there were a couple of things in it, particularly that weird. You know, let’s go in here from the public scene, which well, which which I thought was preposterous nonsense. I agree with you with that. It’s sort of it is. You might find yourself chortling just a bit. I found myself going. Really? Really. I have to say, you haven’t mentioned James, who I think is terrific. Know, I saw. I beg your pardon. Well, yes. I mean, but then again, you see that that secretary role has been done before in others.

I mean, yes, I thought she was very I didn’t see the Brian Cox film, but I so I so I can’t compare them. But I thought what he managed to do very well is say, on the one hand, he was Churchill was singularly unsuited for power. Yeah. And he had a whole history of getting things wrong. They mentioned Gallipoli. They mentioned the Indian famine. I think they mentioned that. They mentioned the succession, all these things. He got spectacularly wrong. It’s just that, on the other hand, he was right about Hitler. And and I think in presenting it like that or saying, OK, I hadn’t really thought about that. And I think they they got that nuance pretty right.

Pretty correct. OK, effective, I thought. Yeah, I think that’s fair enough. I still felt that it was too theatre and too and too on the nose for me.