'Darkest Hour', another poetic presentation of war by Joe Wright
- limetoblue
- Jan 21, 2018
- 4 min read
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched 'Pride & Prejudice', I even still remember that opening scene in 'Atonement', I think 'Anna Karenina' is beautiful in so many ways, and 'Hanna' is one of my favourite assassin movies. Those are my favourite Joe Wright’s works and now, there’s another one.
I have watched 'Darkest Hour' and I love it.
The main reason is because I’m always interested in anything related with WWII. That war gave impacts to the whole world. There were so many battles, stories, different point of views. While the whole history I’ve learnt at school was only from what happened in Southeast Asia and briefly on what happened on the other side of the world, I learnt more about WWII after that. I’ve watched movies and short videos, I read stories about survivors and rebels, those that I’ve never heard or learnt before. It’s devastating and depressing, it’s a worldwide tragedy, but at the same time, it gave you hope.
I may not in the right position to understand very well who Winston Churchill was, good or bad. I may not know whether he made more of a wrong political decision than the right one. This would be a reason for me to read more about him. But, solely about this movie alone, in terms of story, 'Darkest Hour' was presented to us in a beautiful way.
It was so powerful and poetic that I believe are the reasons why I love Wright’s style of storytelling.
From the beginning, there was a couple of scenes taken from a higher point of view, and that scene after scene led to the crucial one when an aircraft dropped bombs to what’s left of the British armies in Calais, the one being abandoned so the government can rescue the other 300,000 men trapped in Dunkirk. It’s hard to imagine if you have to agree with the decision to let 4,000 men died. No one wants to be in that position to decide. Even by thinking that ‘this is war, so sacrifice must be made’, that seemed very cruel. And for this part of the movie, I think Wright really played out well with our logic and emotion.
Also, all of those mise en scène shown in front my eyes were picture perfect. All of the actors gave amazing performance, especially Gary Oldman, of course. I love him being George Smiley in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' and now him being Winston Churchill is my new favourite. That scene when Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill decided to go to Westminster by subway train and talked to the citizen was one of the best.
Other thing that captured my attention was of course the music, created beautifully by Dario Marianelli. This was the fifth time Wright and Marianelli were collaborating together. The second time, 'Atonement', made Marianelli won an Oscar for Best Original Score, with the rest of others put him in the nominations.
Music has always been a part of storytelling. It conveys emotion and helps a director to make the audience feel more related with the story he brings to them. And Wright really took this seriously. In an article by Indiewire, I found out that Marianelli was asked to write the music before the script was even finished.
“Joe is really the only director who asks me to start writing music before shooting,” Marianelli said, “It anchors the music at a pre-visual level.”
That makes sense to me because Wright himself thinks that directing a movie is the same as conducting. In this clip by THR, Wright said,
“Film is the most similar to music than other art form, so I’m always talking about rhythm and almost like conducting a scene, so they (the actors) know where the rise is and where the fall-off is.”
Although there was no significant leitmotif in this movie, I still love it. You can feel another emotional layer when you hear the music while watching the movie.
Now, remember that last year Christopher Nolan made 'Dunkirk'? I wrote in my previous blog post that 'Dunkirk' was very technical, even the music support this vision. You can even see from the BAFTA that this movie received so many nominations related to the technical elements of the movie such as Editing, Production Design, Sound, Special Visual Effects and 4 other nominations. 'Dunkirk' didn’t receive any nominations related with story or acting.
I also wrote that in my preferences, 5-minute scene of Dunkirk in Wright’s 'Atonement' was way better that Nolan’s feature-length 'Dunkirk'. Now, can you imagine how I feel when I watched Wright’s feature-length 'Darkest Hour', a story set around the same timeline of when the event in Dunkirk happened but told in a different point of view and in a different way of storytelling style? I understand that both are different, both cannot be directly compared, but do you get the difference?
'Darkest Hour' is directed by Joe Wright, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn, Stephen Dillane, Samuel West and Ronald Pickup.
Comments