Dunkirk aka when Nolan met Hemingway

David Chen
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Suppose Hemingway were a director, and he made a movie about World War II.

That movie would be Dunkirk, and it is Christopher Nolan’s finest film. (I should preface this superlative statement that I tend to find Nolan overrated).

Nolan lays it out bare in this film and the result is sparse, brutal, and beautiful. Cutting out his tendency for long-winded exposition dumps, he cuts to the core of his characters and the narrative, and the result is pure experience.

While the film is lean in the telling, the imagery is as rich as you’d expect (watch it on the best screen you can; 70mm in my case) and the sound seamless wavers between a tense minimalism and thorough explosiveness. The incessant tick tick ticks advance the movie forward as Nolan’s narrative trick (he can’t help himself) is executed with punch.

As would Hemingway, Dunkirk delivers a narrative on resilience, duty, and courage. In the face of death and terror, we see a full range of emotion, from fear and cowardice to bravery, defiance, and during one of the quiet highlights of the film, grace.

The simplicity of the movie, from the soundtrack to the images to the telling, matches the nature of the (excellent) performances. There’s very little speaking, and even less of it is understandable (there must be some joke behind putting Tom Hardy in a mask at this point, and there’s even more sound and fury drowning out dialogue in this Nolan movie than usual), but the impact of the character’s gestures and eyes tells everything you need to know about how humans face death and hope.

Special recognition to Mark Rylance, whose everyman dignity serves to shine as paragon of duty, compassion, and courage, and of course to Hardy who, as mentioned, delivers heroism simply through his eyes.

David Chen

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Life sciences consultant. Boston, MA. All words my own.