No one is talking about this??
Not the alien one, the real one.
If #OscarsSoWhite keeps Gary Oldman from getting the award for Best Actor it will be the greatest crime in the history of the American Academy of Sciences.
I actually cried once during this film.
Not actually sure if it was a truly good movie.
I’ve heard a clip of Gaz delivering Churchill’s most famous speech, the “Never Surrender”, and messing up the delivery of the words “Never Surrender”, upon which the entire speech hangs. He sounded like a Ruts tribute act. I was worried we’d get Lost In Space Gaz rather than Tinker Tailor Gaz.
I like them both, but they’re best used appropriately.
I doubt it will be very popular. This is more of a portrait film than a story. Oldman does a fine job - occasionally he (the actor) can be seen through the character, but mostly it feels like it is Churchil.
Boy, they make Chamberlin and his ilk look really bad.
Ergh, the simplistic view of Chamberlain as weak is maddening. Right-wingers love it. What Britain needed was time. Big Nev then stepped down, pushed Churchill over a more popular, less capable leader and served under him, a proper public servant.
Compared to today’s troupe of vain idiots he’s a demi-god.
I was going to make a crack about an actor delivering Churchill’s speech over the radio not him. But it looks like that is not true. I feel more than a little pissed off I was duped by David Irving of all people. Even the sight of his name near a Churchill rumour should have tipped me off.
I’ve not read much about Clementine so I was struck by how strongly she is portrayed. What Iittle I’ve read about her she seemed passive, though few could shine within the shadow Churchill cast.
The movie did a good job of presenting the pressures Churchill was under and the shot of him ascending the lift demonstrated how alone he must have felt.
Thumbs up on this one.
I respectful but strongly disagree that the movie put Halifax and especially Chamberlain in a bad light. I though they were portrayed as having serious moral reservations about the wisdom of resisting what at that time seemed to them an invincible German juggernaut. I thought the movie backed this up by emphasizing the seeming hopelessness of the military situation, and how desperate and unworkable Churchill’s proposed solutions sounded at the time. The desire to prevent a second Great War slaughter is made understandable through Halifax’s conversation with King George, which I thought was portrayed if not sympathetically, at least without malice.
I have other issues with the film, but distortion or simplification of the political disagreement between the two wings of the Conservatives is not one of them.
Well, after losing face and continuing to try and drive the same agenda by trying to undermine the new administration, coupled with the fact that it is making nice to Hitler we are talking about (and we have the hindsight of how it was going to be), they were certainly painted as being on the wrong side as far as solutions were concerned.
But I do think they showed Halifax as a schemer.
I was reading Gerhard Weinberg last night, and he wrote something at the beginning of the book that stood out for me along those lines. How we often review WWII with the foreshadow of Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, etc., missing the point that for the participants, they were viewing it through the lens of WWI (and for many, trying to avoid repeating that carnage).
Gary Oldman performance was certainly Oscar-worthy. But when half-your lines are some of the most famous speeches in the English language, there is a lot to work with.
Clementine was his rock and I think she came across that way in the movie. One of the things that surprised is there was no mention of Churchill likely being Manic-Depressive.
I’m with Booksi the simplistic view of Chamberlin is popular, and history proved Churchill correct. But I think of Chamberlin as being a bit like Bush 41, “it wouldn’t prudent” to finish taking out Saddam. The prudent thing was for England to negotiate a separate peace. I’m less familiar with Baldwin so I don’t really know about the portrayal. It is absolutely true we look at WWII through the lens of the recent events, and the participants were trying to avoid the horror of WWI.
Churchill in the underground scene was totally Hollywood, but I found it pretty effective.
Reading Huckabee tweet after seeing the movie makes me want to projectile vomit…
Did the movie not have Churchill’s famous, “Guys, I’m really smart, people tell me all the time, ‘Winston, you’re a really smart, stable guy,’” speech?
That’s the thing, this desire was totally reasonable. They weren’t bad men for wanting to avoid a replay of the greatest loss of human life in history.
But the problem is, those seemingly reasonable desires were wrong. Or rather, their inability to recognize that shit was gonna go down anyway, was wrong.
Sometimes, the best choice is horrific.
This realization is hard for many folks to come to terms with.
Yeah, wanting to avoid the nightmare of world war 1 is not weakness, it’s moral. That it failed is just because humans are stupid
This, this, and this. Europe kicked the holy living shit out of itself in WWI, and, twenty years later, the powers that be had forgotten none of the filthy and misery of Flanders. It’s Monday Morning QB’ing to go overboard in criticizing Chamberlain; I have no doubt that he wanted to avoid another hell by giving Hitler what he wanted. Not cowardice, per se – rather, deep moral qualms about another all-encompassing conflict.
Churchill, on the other hand, was a born belligerent, and was perfect for his role when Hitler finally said, “Eh, fuck it,” and invaded Poland.
I actually wasn’t trying to defend Chamberlain and Halifax, just address what I thought the film’s portrayal of them was. To @mok’s point, I do agree that Halifax did seem to be cast in a sinister light, more so than Chamberlain, painting the opposition as almost conspiratorial. @Strollen, I thought Oldman’s most effective and probably challenging bits were the non-speech parts. He moved from irritable cuss to gruff but charming interlocutor to almost obsequious husband with such ease that I was thoroughly riveted throughout the movie.
I thought the movie’s script left a lot to be desired, and the Hollywood exposition that @Strollen points out would have sent me walking out to the concession to get a second Coke in any other movie (as would the scene in the Underground). I also thought the cinematography was a bit Merchant Ivory. In most other movies, this would have really bothered me. For some reason, none of it did here. Maybe I’m not as jaded as I thought.
Your view of Chamberlain actually matches Churchill’s pretty well. When, after Churchill had become PM, Randolph said something scornful about Chamberlain, Winston replied that Chamberlain had been trying to preserve the peace and what could be more noble than that? The difference was that Churchill knew that you couldn’t bargain honorably with someone like Hitler.
You can’t watch this without comparing it John Lithgow’s brilliant portrayal of Churchill in The Crown. Although whereas Lithgow’s Churchill had defeated Hitler and was dealing with his own post-war fall and rise and fall, Oldman’s Churchill hasn’t defeated Hitler yet and is doubtful that he can. They’re both very powerful performances.
Now we just need a Young Churchill movie with Domhnall Gleeson at Omdurman.
The first book of the Last Lion biography would be amazing as a movie.
Agreed. Winston the earlier years would be a great adventure/action movie. He traveled to 6 continents and was shot at on 4 by his early 30s. One of his Granddaughter wrote a book tracing his early travels, it took her 3 years using jet airplanes vs his steam ships.
I liked Oldman in this, although not enough to forgive him pipping Kaluuya to the Oscar, if Kaluuya’s even nominated. The physical representation was bang on. Dillane was excellent. Cast good all round. Wriiting less so; there’s an insulting vox pop scene near the end that makes Churchill look like Nick Clegg in 2010, when the UK was briefly impressed when he remembered some questioners names in a debate before realising he was useless.
This is a very Joe Wright Joe Wright film. One eye fixed on Joe Wright holding an award telling everyone how lucky they are to have Joe Wright explain well-examined history to them, especially these days. The other used to cobble together flashy sequences like Edgar Wright, and bawdy Richard Curtis-style scenes - he films Churchill on the khazi every 20 minutes - without nailing either. And the aerial shots! There was a comedy show broadcast in 1990 that followed a fictional set of sextuplets, the most hapless of which was a family photographer obsessed with ‘top shots’, to the detriment of his already limited talent.
Joe ‘Top Shot’ Wright