Darkest Hour (2018) - A Great Man To Look Up To.

★★★★★

It’s really been along while since I last saw a great historical drama that is ‘Lincoln’ from whoa, 6 years ago, which helped Daniel Day Lewis grab his third Academy Award for Best Actor. In director Joe Wright’s latest ‘Darkest Hour’, Gary Oldman, with help of makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji’s amazing touch, totally disappears into Winston Churchill, a very honorable figure, and undoubtedly the most important during the Second World War, and probably even in the human history.

Frankly speaking, if Gary Oldman’s not to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his truly stunning transformation in ‘Darkest Hour’, I don’t know who else would. This is the best performance he’s ever pulled off in his acting career, hands down. The way he walks, stares, and stutters, his whole body language makes you feel like there can’t possibly be Gary Oldman under the makeup. It’s purely magic and so convincing! It’s like seeing Winston Churchill come to life, though some of us may not know for sure about the real Churchill! A performance like that is simply captivating and powerful enough to make you forgive the weakness of the story. I’m not saying the storytelling of the film is weak. It’s, on the contrary, straight and focused and a bit more entertaining compared with other serious bio dramas. I’m in fact fonder of Gary Oldman here than of Daniel Day Lewis in ‘Lincoln’!

Shame that I don’t know much about Winston Churchill. All I know is he’d been to wars since his young age; elected twice the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; yelled ‘never surrender’ to Hitler, changed the course of history at Dunkirk and led Britain and its allies to win over the Nazi Germany; and to my surprise, he, as a politician, even won the Nobel Prize in Literature!

Churchill seems even greater than Lincoln himself in a sense but ‘Darkest Hour’ doesn’t see him as flawless. The film pictures Churchill as a down-to-earth real character, addicted to cigars and alcohol, grumpy, weak and helpless sometimes, instead of some sort of invincible super hero in wartime. He’s not always eloquent though he finally ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’. He seems like you and me yet he’s larger than you and me. For without him, the history of WWII would have been so different; the destiny of Europe would have been bleak under Hitler’s dictatorship; the future of entire human race would have been darker than ever. Churchill was the only one who’d kept a clear mind that ‘you cannot reason with a tiger when your head’s already in its mouth’, and therefore was determined to fight against incredible odds while all the others were apt to give in to Hitler! It was tough absolutely, but tough times make great leaders for they have to make tough decisions after tough decisions.

Speaking of great leaders, there’re basically two kinds, the good ones that would lead you to triumphs, and the bad ones that would course you straight to hell. Both are considered great since they’re very capable of instigating and motivating people. The difference is, the good would listen and do what the people want, while the bad would just brainwash the people to do what they want. The last subway scene in the film is such a prefect demonstration of how a good great leader’s supposed to be like. Even though it didn’t really happen, deep research does suggest that Churchill did pop up somewhere in London back then to ask ordinary civilians whether they wanted to fight off Hitler or make a deal with him. The truth is, British people all look up to Churchill. They adore him as a faithful political leader, or a writer who valued human values, or just an ordinary man that seemed so imperfect yet so strong!

It’s very sad and disturbing to see that about 800,000 people die every year due to suicide, which is one person every 40 seconds. So by the time I finish writing this article, many, many people have ended their lives with their own hands, probably because they can’t stand the pressure of success or failure. I wonder, if they have the courage to end their lives, why no courage to continue. One of Churchill’s famous quotes, ‘Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts’, really is an inspiration. Many ask the purpose of life but there’s no such a thing as the purpose of life to achieve in life as a matter of fact. Success or failure is irrelevant. Life itself is the purpose!