Can 'Darkest Hour' Avoid the Pitfalls That Have Plagued so Many Churchill Films?

It may well be impossible ever to make a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby that can successfully live up to the full majesty of the novel. Hollywood has tried it five times, each with disappointing results despite impressive casts including Robert Redford and, most recently, Leo DiCaprio. The soul of the great novel just doesn’t translate to the silver screen. Not even 3-D can solve the problem; the story will always engage the imagination of a reader more than ny celluloid version.

The same difficulty arises with nearly all film treatments of Winston Churchill, the greatest human being of the 20th century. His largeness of soul, his capacious intellect, his legendary wit, his soaring oratory, and the length, breadth, and heated controversies of his long career—including many disasters, mistakes, and personal setbacks—are hard to render in the compressed format of feature films while retaining the profundity and substance of the man. Most films or TV shows about Churchill, or containing a significant Churchill role, are disappointing. There are a few exceptions, all of which owe their success to combining three related challenges in the right proportion.

The first and most obvious is casting. The role has humbled some of the greatest actors of modern times such as Richard Burton, whose 1974 turn in The Gathering Storm is entirely forgettable. The question is freshly acute with the arrival of Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman in the starring role, which has become controversial even before its general theatrical release this week, and coming on the heels of two other Churchill depictions, last summer’s Churchill featuring Brian Cox in the title role, and the prominent inclusion of Churchill’s character in the Netflix series The Crown. The less said about Churchill the better. This film took Churchill on the eve of the D-Day landing as its focus, and the result is a film that is not just ahistorical, but anti-historical. The summary judgment of Andrew Roberts, currently working on his own Churchill biography, is sufficient: “The only problem with the movie—written by the historian Alex von Tunzelmann—is that it gets absolutely everything wrong. Never in the course of movie-making have so many specious errors been made in so long a film by so few writers.” John Lithgow in The Crown plays a stooped-over Churchill who was borderline senile, a gross caricature of the reality of Churchill’s second premiership. Part of the problem is a defective script, but at 6-foot-4, Lithgow would seem a poor physical match for the 5-foot-6 inch Churchill, if nothing else.

The second challenge for every screenwriter and director is what story line, or period of Churchill’s life, should a film try to cover or employ as a character study? A person who was in office for more than 50 years, who switched parties twice, who was at the center of two world wars and the beginning of the Cold War, who saw combat as a young soldier on horseback (including the last full cavalry charge of the British army and a daring escape from a prisoner of war camp) and as middle-aged commander in the trenches, who was present in New York for the great crash of 1929 and later run over by a car on Fifth Avenue . . . you get the idea. And how can the many facets of Churchill’s character and talents be conveyed—the soldier, the politician, the painter, the author of 50 books, the connoisseur of fine food and wine, the raconteur, the sportsman—even a turn as a bricklayer? There’s good reason he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Half Century” in 1950. At that time the magazine said “no man’s history can sum up the dreadful, wonderful years, 1900-1950. Churchill’s story comes closest.”

The temptation is usually to cast Churchill at his peak, in his “finest hour” in World War II, but that is such a large story, involving other great figures such as FDR and Stalin, that Churchill usually ends up weakly defined. Most films attempting to portray Churchill against the wide canvas of the whole war, such as the 1994 made-for-TV movie World War II: When Lions Roared, are bland and forgettable, and capture the “roar” of Churchill at a very low decibel level and in monochromatic tones. When Lions Roared offers Bob Hoskins as Churchill, and is the weakest performance of the cast, which offers Michael Caine as Stalin and, ironically, John Lithgow turning in the best performance of the film as FDR. (Maybe someday Lithgow can be offered a Stalin film vehicle to complete the trifecta—he could do his own one-man Yalta show perhaps)