Review - Dunkirk

'War is hell' is not fresh fodder for the movies. For a hundred years filmmakers have employed the bombastic, enveloping power of cinema to show audiences just how horrible it is to walk a mile in a soldier's boots, from early touchstones like All Quiet on the Western Front to modern incarnations like Hacksaw Ridge.
But seldom is the chaos of combat evoked with such precision and formal exactitude as it is in Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's visceral, artfully disorienting account of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from the eponymous beach in the spring of 1940.

The 'Miracle of Dunkirk' is considered a linchpin moment of the second World War – A sort of psychological victory salvaged from an untenable military fiasco in France. Some 400 000 British, French and Belgian men found themselves stranded at the tiny port town of Dunkerque while the German noose tightened around them, waiting to be ferried across the English Channel to safety. The fact that so many of them lived to fight another day became an early cornerstone of the war effort, preserving Britain's might and boosting her morale.

At least, that's how history (having been written by the victors) remembers it.

Survivors might remember Dunkirk differently, and it's their experience that wins Nolan's interest. His vision of the event is markedly apolitical, pure and unfettered in its focus on the simple details of survival. These details range from the mundane – a man squeezes a garden hose for a few drops of fresh water – to the fantastic – soldiers hide from Nazi bullets in the hull of a sinking ship – but all are evoked with gripping authenticity.

Nolan never gives face to the encroaching forces, a shrewd calculation made by great war dramatists before him. There is just the 'enemy', manifested as bombs and torpedoes and phantom riflemen, as ubiquitous and implacable as the waves that continually bring dead bodies into shore with the flotsam and jetsam.

To broaden the purview of his study, Nolan adopts a three-pronged narrative that tells the story from land, sea and air. One occurs over the course of a week:
Men lining up on the beaches and piers to board large vessels meant to take them home, but are sitting ducks for strafing fighter jets and stealthy U-boats.
Another occurs over a day: A pleasure craft (one of many small boats conscripted to aid the mission) braves the channel to bring back as may men as she can carry. The third transpires in a mere hour: A trio of Supermarine Spitfires providing crucial air support for the vulnerable rescue ships.

Though disparate in their time frames and exact geography, Nolan weaves these cascading threads together – complete with fleeting visual totems of events we've already witnessed and ones yet to come – until all three intersect thrillingly in the film's tour-de-force climax.

While not quite a temporal Rubik's cube on the order of his high-concept experiments in Memento, Inception, or even Interstellar, it is still a brilliant construct that allows Nolan and film editor Lee Smith to protract the release of adrenaline for the entire film. The tension scarcely ebbs for an hour and 45 minutes (Nolan's most slender work in an age), propelled by the insistent ticking of Hans Zimmer's clock-inspired motifs.

For a director sometimes criticized for verbose exposition, Dunkirk throws Nolan's oft overlooked capacity as a visual storyteller into sharp relief. He and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema develop a not-quite-vérité visual language for this experiential piece, immersing the audience in the action (especially when seen in stunning IMAX) while maintaining a comprehensible objective view of what is happening in the thick of it. Nolan's dogmatic devotion to 70mm film has inspired some petty online debate over which shooting/viewing formats are best, but imagery this bracing and textured truly benefits from that huge screen, and sure makes a dizzying ride of those aerial dog fights.

The visual sensibilities thankfully extend to Nolan's script as well. His dialogue is atypically sparse and decidedly undramatic, allowing Richard King's deafening sound effects to do the bulk of the talking. Most of his characters serve merely as ciphers for everymen beset by one deadly circumstance after another. His ensemble still makes the most of these somewhat limited characterizations, most notably Fionn Whitehead and Aneurin Barnard in a pair of practically silent performances as two soldiers foiled at every attempt to sneak themselves off the besieged beach.

It is perhaps because of them and the other fine cast members – including Tom Hardy as a courageous RAF pilot who courts death to save lives, Kenneth Branagh as a weathered officer trying to lend some semblance of order and dignity to a frantic situation, and Mark Rylance as a civilian volunteer with saintly composure in a literal sea of unrest – that Dunkirk achieves what has long eluded Nolan's works: That we care about the people in them.

Whether history designates Dunkirk a great war film or a great anti-war film (or merely a great action movie set against a harrowing historical backdrop) remains to be seen. But if this notoriously coy filmmaker is making some sort of statement in his magnum opus, it's not by trying to shout 'war is hell' above the relentless din of gunfire and explosions. That's too simple for Nolan.

His message about the insensible contradictions of war and its human impact is encoded in the film's antithetical closing montage [MILD SPOILERS]:
An Englishman who made that dangerous trip across the channel reads an obituary for a young man from his town who did the same, declared a “Hero at Dunkirk”; A pilot stands tall and stoic, backlit by the almost romantic glow of his burning aircraft; A pair of infantrymen drink to their salvation on board the train to Dover, underscored by proud orchestral swells and a narration of Churchill's famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech...

Yet through his juxtaposition of triumphant tone and sobering context, Nolan implies that these valorous tableaux are falsehoods. Even this “miracle of deliverance” is a Grande Illusion, veiling inexplicable trauma:

The noble obituary for the sacrificed youth, though written as a sort of symbolic truth, is in fact a lie invented to blot out a senseless tragedy;

The downed pilot – his torched plane a beacon to his captors – is ushered away to whatever untold horrors await him as a prisoner of war;

And when the picture fades to black on the last musical coda, Nolan cuts unexpectedly (his one arrhythmic beat in the whole film) to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it parting shot: The rescued soldier reading Mr. Churchill's galvanizing address glances up from the newspaper, and in his eyes we see an innocence lost. He is a lamb, snatched from the jaws of death, who realizes he's being led back to the slaughter.

**** out of ****