Darkest Hour: A shining achievement

Darkest Hour (2017) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and war sequences
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.29.17

Even knowing the outcome, thanks to the obvious historical record and ongoing pop culture reminders, director Joe Wright and scripter Anthony McCarten maintain a remarkable level of stomach-clenching suspense during every moment of this enthralling drama.

As Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) pauses attentively, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman)
parses words in order to place the desired emphasis on what will be one of the most
important speeches of his career.

Scene by scene, amid political clashes and confrontations, we endure palpable panic: Are our memories faulty? Will it all go wrong?

No, of course not. But the total, we-are-there immersion is quite impressive.

Darkest Hour takes place during a tempestuous several weeks in the spring of 1940: from May 10, when 65-year-old, hard-drinking Winston Churchill is named to replace Neville Chamberlain as the British Prime Minister; to June 4, in the aftermath of the Dunkirk miracle that gave additional weight to Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in the House of Commons.

Fans of this period in British history are enjoying an embarrassment of riches; we’ve now experienced these events from strikingly different points of view, thanks to summer’s Dunkirk, television’s The Crown and now Wright’s Darkest Hour.

As depicted by McCarten — a double Oscar nominee, as scripter and producer of 2014’s The Theory of Everything — Churchill’s rise to that galvanic speech was anything but assured, and Chamberlain was far from disgraced and impotent, after being shunted aside. He and Viscount Halifax (née Edward Frederick Lindley Wood) remained relentless in their quest for appeasement by offering a treaty to Hitler, even as — particularly as — Western Europe’s countries fell, like a row of dominoes, against the Nazi assault.

And Chamberlain’s influence was considerable, as he still controlled the Conservative half of the House of Commons, all of the members fully prepared — in blinkered, knee-jerk fashion — to vote party over conscience, thereby stripping Churchill of his new position. (And boy, doesn’t that resonate these days, on this side of the pond!)

The political infighting is both fascinating and horrifying, but the film’s true power comes from Gary Oldman’s sublime portrayal of Churchill: one of those rare performances that is so thorough, so all-consuming, that it ceases to be acting. As far as I’m concerned, Wright and McCarten somehow found the means to resurrect Churchill, so he could star in his own story.

Suffragette: Solid emancipation drama

Suffragette (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang 

Had Carey Mulligan been born in a different time and place, she likely would have become popular among painters or photographers eager to explore the complexities of her amazingly expressive features.

After being arrested a second time, Maud (Carey Mulligan) is presented with a tempting
offer by Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson). He'll make the charges against her melt
away ... if she'll become his spy.

Her capacity for forlorn resignation — for tolerant anguish, and acceptance of a fate that she understands is unjust — is particularly acute. I imagine her becoming the face of Dorothea Lange’s iconic, Depression-era photo, Migrant Mother.

Mulligan has demonstrated this capacity for quietly compliant sorrow in several films, most notably 2010’s haunting Never Let Me Go, likely to remain one of the bleakest — and most cautionary — science fiction parables ever made. What makes her work in such parts so memorably heartbreaking, of course, is the perceptive intelligence that’s always present behind her melancholy gaze.

She once again displays such emotional intensity in yet another of this season’s cinematic depictions of our turbulent past: the desperate, early 20th century nadir of the British women’s emancipation movement, in director Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette. Scripter Abi Morgan — who won a well-deserved Emmy Award for her compelling Cold War-era miniseries, The Hour — has surrounded Mulligan’s composite “typical working-class character” with actual historical figures, to persuasively portray what it must have been like for the agitators determined to win not only the right to vote, but a greater measure of control over their own lives.

And dignity. Definitely dignity.

I never cease to be amazed — becoming immersed in real-life stories of this nature — by mankind’s ability to exceed even my lowest opinion of their behavior.

In this particular case, of course, the emphasize is on mankind.

The setting is London in 1912, where Maud Watts (Mulligan) and her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), work onerous, back-breaking — and highly dangerous — hours in a laundry. The shop is run by Norman (Geoff Bell), a slimy, lecherous brute who could have stepped right out of a Dickens novel, and whose interest in Maud feels decidedly unhealthy: a dynamic that Sonny obviously notices, but apparently chooses to ignore.

Maud’s world shifts slightly when, heading home one day, she finds herself in the midst of a vandalizing protest by members of the Women’s Society and Political Union (WSPU). Shop windows are smashed; the perpetrators melt back into the crowd before the police arrive ... but not before Maud recognizes one of them, Violet (Anne-Marie Duff), as a co-worker.