I felt both pleasure and a measure of frustration watching The Darkest Hour, partly for reasons that are unfair to the movie as a work of art.
The Darkest Hour is the story of Winston Churchill and Great Britain around the time of the fall of France in World War II. It centers on Britain’s decision to continue the war rather than make peace with Germany.
This is the period when Britain stood alone against Hitler, before he invaded the Soviet Union and before the United States entered the war. The Soviets had a non-aggression pact with Germany and the United States was bound by the Neutrality Act, which both reflected the strength of anti-war sentiment in the United States and practically constrained Roosevelt’s efforts to help Britain.
It presents Churchill as a lovable, eloquent eccentric who faced off against a peace faction within the British cabinet led by Lord Halifax that felt the war could not be won. Churchill’s motives in the film are moral and temperamental: Hitler is evil and Churchill is a fighter, therefore Hitler must be fought. The peace faction is effete and out of touch.
The characters are drawn accordingly: Halifax (played by Stephen Dillane) speaks with a lisp and is faintly villainous, Churchill (played by Gary Oldman) is brilliant and hilarious, and King George V (played by Ben Mendelsohn) is naive but has a deep sense of fair play that leads him to move from the peace faction to Churchill’s side.
Oldman and Mendelsohn are excellent. Both have amazing range: It’s worth watching Mendelsohn’s performance as a king in The Darkest Hour and then seeing him as a criminal who is simultaneously pitiful and terrifying in Animal Kingdom and then as a lovable loser in Mississippi Grind.
Dillane is underused; forced to play a caricature as Halifax. His work in Game of Thrones shows that he could have made Halifax as more interesting character who, even if proved wrong by history, was motivated by decent objectives and sound logic. He was likely told to play Halifax as a simple character to make sure the audience knows who to root for.
Therein lies the first of my frustrations: The peace faction’s position was reasonable. Germany had the strongest military in the world and had just conquered all of Europe in short order.
With the resources of Europe at Germany’s disposal, what were Britain’s odds fighting alone against a determined Germany? The Darkest Hour spends little time on this question.
It’s hard for us to feel the desperateness of the British position, since we know that the Soviet Union and the United States soon join the war against Germany and we know how evil the Nazis were. But a much more interesting movie could have been made that asked serious questions about the morality of resisting against the odds.
For most peoples during the war, irrational resistance meant annihilation. Ask the Poles what happened when you resisted both Hitler and Stalin.
Capitulation, by contrast, offered a measure of preservation. What would be left of Paris if the French had resisted to the end? And what would have been gained if they had? The war was destined to be won on the streets of Stalingrad and could not have been won on the streets of Paris.
In ancient times, Athens sought to dominate the small city of Melos and raised a vastly superior force for this purpose. The Athenians told the Melians: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians refused to submit, citing the injustice of the Athenian demands. The Melians predicted that the gods would help them.
Athens wiped Melos off the face of the earth.
Was it morally right for the Melians to resist on grounds of justice and to ignore questions of power?
The Darkest Hour could have been a much more thoughtful movie if it took seriously the need to confront matters of strategy instead of reducing them to questions of justice and courage.
Yes, I am being a curmudgeon. As a history lover, I should be happy that a very good movie has been made about an interesting period and that it gets a great many things right. For most people watching The Darkest Hour, their alternative was not a more philosophically sophisticated historical film, it was a comic book movie.
And yet, perhaps because it is a good movie, I wonder what more it could have been.
My second frustration with The Darkest Hour is even more unfair to the movie as a work of art. The Darkest Hour gives one the impression that a brave democracy defeated Hitler, partly because of the virtues (courage, a sense of justice) that made it a basically decent country in the first place. In other words, the good guys won because of the things that made them the good guys.
Really? The main story of Hitler’s defeat is that one bad guy got beaten by another bad guy who was, for all his errors, a lot better at being bad. By this I mean that Stalin, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the main author of Hitler’s defeat.
The tide of the war turned on the Eastern Front as the Soviets beat back the Germans at Stalingrad in 1943, more than a year before the United States and Britain landed forces in France.
The tide turned there partly because of the heroism of the Soviet people, but more deeply because of the ruthlessness of the Soviet state. Stalin mobilized every resource for war, devoting a far larger proportion of his economy to the war effort than any other combatant and a far greater proportion of his human resources as well.
That is to say that he enslaved his own people and sent millions to their deaths, often with little regard for the human cost. He pushed soldiers into battle without proper equipment, he refused to evacuate civilians from war zones, he pressed millions of citizens to labor under brutal conditions. And that is why he won.
Stalin was able to do this because he had built the most terrifying repressive apparatus the world has ever seen. He’d spent a decade eliminating every source of real or imagined resistance to his rule and used that same machine of terror to mobilize his country for war.
Of course, the Soviets had to mobilize. Their survival was on the line. But I am reminded of a scene in The Darkest Hour where Churchill rides the London Underground and asks British citizens if they think that Britain should continue to oppose Hitler. They bravely answer that Britain should and Churchill draws strength from his people’s endorsement.
Can you imagine a similar scene featuring Stalin? And that is one reason why the main story of Hitler’s defeat would not make for a good movie. We can relate to a government asking for its people’s consent and that people rising to the challenge.
But Stalin’s way of war is not merely evil to modern eyes, it is incomprehensible. Imagine a film that has no true characters because they are all killed within the first third of the movie.
I am reminded of a criticism that was directed at Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s movie about the Holocaust that tells the story of a German industrialist who saves his Jewish workers from the death camps. Some lauded the movie as an artistic accomplishment, but noted that, in the main story, most bystanders did not intervene and most Jews were not saved. Schindler’s List was therefore simultaneously beautiful, true, and misleading.
My second frustration with The Darkest Hour is similar. It is a true story and a story well told. But the main story of Hitler’s defeat is very different.
